Hello everyone.

I'm putting together a rather large project, and am currently at a point that I'm waiting on several replies from people that are inactive, unreachable, and can't find anything on any of the permission pages that states the modders wishes.

I was sort of wondering what the general feeling was with these types of situations?

Obviously, I don't want to step on any toes, or upset anyone. What does everyone else do in these situations? Move on without that item, or say I've waited x amount of weeks with no response, so I'm moving forward anyways?

Any insights on this are appreciated.

My opinion - go for it. Technically no license left in the readme means "all rights reserved", but we are talking about free stuff here, made as a hobby, so those who didn't left any information about usage probably don't really care about permissions. As long as you won't do something silly like preventing other modders from using your work, when the work itself is based on other mods, I don't see anything wrong in your approach. Just write proper credits and respect author’s will if someone will suddenly show up and demand his/her work to be removed (very unlikely would be my guess).

First, make sure you have done everything possible to try to contact the modders.
But you haven't done that yet, because you didn't mention who these modders are in this thread for us to reply about. Perhaps someone might know some info on how to contact them, or what their final thoughts about modding were, etc.
They might be very easy to contact, just not with the old info you have

For example, I got permission from old modders for certain things that no one else ever used. They gladly let me use them, despite never mentioning permissions in any ReadMe. No one might ever be able to contact them again, but I have the experience of them being very open to sharing.

It also depends on the mod. If it's something small that seems to have just been released and long forgotten, you can probably use it without pissing anyone off. Just make to sure you give credit and are willing to remove it from your mod if they ask.
Larger projects should be just be added to, instead of incorporating into your own.

In the mean time you can alsways check the http://mw.modhistory.com/permissions on MMH for those authors you haven't got an answer from yet.

Have checked that.

None of them are large projects, mostly just armor mods really.

Currently, I'm looking at getting in touch with Kalikut, Cythus, Jayson, and Wizbang.

It's been a few years since I've seen Kalikut around - however if you check his profile here at the forums he left a message regarding permissions - I'll post it below