I imagine most people will have already seen this announcement, but just in case you haven’t:
I hope he finds someone. I remember he got the stackexchange site started-well, in area 51 anyway. I wish it would’ve taken off.
It was pretty inspirational (and shocking) to me that he created Quest when he was so young. But I guess we all have/need to move on.
Quest helped XML click for me a bit. So I’m glad it exists even if I never programmed in it.
I went to github and starred both quest and squiffy. Seems the least I could do
It’s kinda sad to see Quest (possibly) ending like this, even though I haven’t used it in years and never liked it much anyway.
When I first stumbled on the IF scene about 15 years ago, Quest was one of the two systems I tried my hand at (the others were aimed at programmers and I as a non-programmer found them pretty mindboggling). I eventually chose ADRIFT because it seemed much better designed and was a heck of a lot easier to use, not to mention having a more active user base, but I always felt Quest had potential. It had a lot of power, much more than ADRIFT ever had, but the GUI interface was just plain confusing. Pop up windows on top of more pop up windows, bugs galore, basic commands missing (you couldn’t go UP or DOWN or WEAR items unless you specifically added those commands yourself), etc. Unfortunately, future versions of Quest just seemed to pile on the bad design decisions without ever addressing the issues that plagued the system. In the end, I stopped trying to make headway with it and just carried on with ADRIFT instead.
Saying that, it is sad to see it might go under like this. It could have been a really good system.
I like Squiffy. And discussion about it on the textadventures forum got me to try javascript. 
The other year, I took a look at both Quest and Adrift for an almost proof-of-concept game idea. I found Quest more intuitive in terms of doing what I wanted to do, and I liked that I could turn off some of the things I dislike most about common Quest games.
It also makes some interesting presentation choices. I may be misremembering, but I think it’s not possible to have introductory text before your first room unless you give it its own page. To me, it’s interesting to see the ways game systems rebel against the conventions given to us from Infocom and try to evaluate how I feel about that.
EDIT: I want to add that I’ve also been very impressed with Alex’s commitment to open source and his outreach to get Quest in classrooms and all over. I hope there is a successor who pursues these same ideals.
seems to have gone way beyond that, huh? 
Thanks for the updates. I really don’t have any .net experience beyond making a few edits in Trizbort or I might help out.
I assumed Merk also wanted to step away but it’d be neat to see him back.
It looks like Jay Nabonne and The Pixie are interested in taking over. Hooray!
That’s great - Jay Nabonne is ridiculously smart. He made an unusually interesting choice based game in Quest called Spondre.
Yeah, The Piixie’s written some good stuff. It may be better to have 2 people in charge instead of 1.
Alex has earned his break and/or turn to move on to even bigger and better things.
I don’t think Alex gets the appreciation he deserves. Squiffy is brilliant and I keep wanting to use it if I can find a story that would make use of the bells and whistles.