proper procedure on modification (take-over) rewrite
 

There is a modification that is somewhat popular that has not seen any participation by the coder in about a years time, the last time the coder has been on line to visit this site is over six months ago, the modification, in several areas, is lacking in its ability to scale, and I have made attempts to contact the orginal coder using several avaliable resources to no avail. What would be considered 'proper' just due to take the orginal idea and some of the orginal code, why reinvent the wheel, and post a, after rewrite, 'new' modification?

There is no reason you cannot make a mod that does the same thing, many ideas have been done more than once by people - however, you could not use the original code without permission (unless the original code was posted with specific rights allowing anyone else to re-use it).

Thank you for your input and suggestion.