"Custom-made replacement" does not sound promising. Most of these sites use the Xenforo software to manage the forum (SMG included), and I doubt that one dude, or even a handful of dudes, could replicate the functionality of something as robust as that, and certainly not in a short amount of time. Hopefully they don't mean that they're writing a custom forum application from scratch and just that they're finding an alternative - otherwise we might never see SC again.
