First of all, thank you everybody for those very kind words. It’s important for me to know all of this was not for nothing.
I want to clarify something which seems to be very unclear. mqTranslate is now deprecated. It does not mean it won’t work anymore on your websites. It would have been marked obsolete in that case. mqTranslate will continue to work with WP 4.2 (so at least until the release of WP 4.3 planned in August and maybe even after that if the update needed to maintain it is not too heavy).
Unfortunately, maintaining the plugin and providing support is not possible for me anymore. And, sooner or later, mqTranslate will die.
Long story short. Two and a half years ago, I ran into the same problem as you with the original qTranslate: long delays between updates, inconsistencies with WordPress, etc. So, I decided to modify the plugin we used internally in my company and it finally became mqTranslate.
However, releasing mqTranslate on the plugin repository was maybe not my best shot ever. Despite my strong will to do it properly, I never managed to free enough spare time to handle all the support requests. From my perspective, mqTranslate would require at least a half-time developer to be correctly maintained and users to get the support they deserve. But as everyone else, I have to generate income to pay the bills, and working half-time on a non-profit open source plugin is not a good way to generate that amount of income. Donations are not sufficient as it would require gathering at least US$1500.00 per month (I live in France). I could have proposed paid customer support but it leverages many more problems I do not want to take care of (such as contractual, legal, etc.).
So, when John came and proposed his new fork, qTranslate X, based itself on zTranslate, we enter in a discussion on how we could work together. Unfortunately, I discovered a very different approach in how to complete a potential merge. And, in great part by my fault, we did not success to agree on a common way to do it. I decided on my own to deprecate the plugin to inform users of the existence of a much brighter future for them in the hands of John, who can devote much more time than I will ever be able and provides a very good support.
Concerning Visual Composer, I’m pretty sure to have read in an email that John is looking for a complete support of this plugin by qTranslate X. Give him the time to implement it (as well as for other plugins). I am very confident qTranslate X will be a great place to be for qTranslate users. In the meantime, you can stick with mqTranslate.
@tfagen and @ricomtl: Please do not take offense for what I will say, because there isn’t any in the following. A donation link has been available for the past year on the www.ads-software.com plugin repository’s page. A very few users have used it (and I thank them very much for that once again). It is interesting to note that now the deprecation of the plugin is threatening your businesses, you may consider paying to maintain it. The even interesting aspect of it is that if the plugin hadn’t been free in the beginning no one would have use it. When I deprecated the plugin, I removed the donation link as it was disrespectul to continue to accept donations for a dead plugin.
