V3.15: GPT-5.6 Translation, Codex Wiki v2, Entity Likes & the Tier Refresh

Simpler round pricing — tiers are now $5 / $12 / $25 (Reader / Translator Base / Translator Pro), and existing patrons are being moved to the updated prices too (Translator Base $9.99 → $12)
AI Text-to-Speech now on Translator Base ($12) and up — unlimited. Previously Translator Pro only
Wiki generation is now a Translator Pro ($25) exclusive — 60/month
Previews and full requests mirrored — Translator Base 32 / 32, Translator Pro 96 / 96 per month
Translator Pro retranslation bumped — 75 chapter and 750 paragraph retranslations per day
AI Chat retired — the feature saw little use and has been removed site-wide (frontend, backend, and its quotas)

Background back-catalog upgrade — the dedicated backlog worker (introduced in V3.14 on GPT-5.5) was upgraded to GPT-5.6, re-translating older chapters (from gemini-2.5-flash-lite / DeepSeek), prioritising untranslated content first and sweeping by novel popularity
Resilient background processing — the backlog paces itself and backs off cleanly under load instead of erroring, so live reading is never affected
Title merged into the first chunk — one LLM call now translates title + body together and splits the title back out, saving a separate title-translation call (and dodging the Vertex 429 title fallback)
Larger GPT/entity chunks (150 paragraphs) for ~90% single-pass throughput

Rebuilt wiki generation — a single GPT-5.6 call (was nine), with incremental refresh, a daily regen beat, and a strict 100%-translated-indexed gate so wikis are never half-baked
Wiki reports — flag a bad or spoiler-heavy wiki from the entity page; report history is visible to users
Per-novel entity wikis — a general character now gets its own wiki per novel, RAG-scoped to that novel's chapters

Instagram-style entity likes (heart) with live counts across every entity surface, plus a "Most Liked" browse sort
Slug URLs for entity / codex / glossary / summaries pages, with canonical-on-load and legacy redirects
Richer entity detail — wiki/image model attribution, a fullscreen image lightbox with mobile swipe, sibling-novel wikis, a Codex button, and an Entity Info box
Entity art on gpt-image-2 (@ medium) — genre-driven render styles, grounded/epithet prompts, cross-entity identity fixes, and 640px thumbnails; full regen of the catalogue
Behind the scenes: entity concept classifier — every entity gets a kind + attributes and within-novel duplicate detection, with a junk filter and an adversarial verify pass, quietly cleaning up glossaries

GIFs in comments, reviews & replies — a KLIPY-powered GIF picker
"Recent from the community" teaser on the home page — the newest reviews and comments (GIFs included)
Notification cards render live images/GIFs now instead of static placeholders
Review + comment improvements and better track-record attribution for glossary edits and novel reports

Cover thumbnails — WebP thumbnails cut the home payload dramatically (it had ballooned to ~28MB); served in card/list contexts
Landing + community/home consolidated into a single edge-cached API call; static assets moved to cdn.randomtranslator.com
Self-hosted Inter font, real <a href> navigation site-wide (open-in-new-tab works everywhere), and CLS / render-blocking-CSS fixes for a faster first paint
Novel page — a Characters preview is embedded in the detail API, and the chapter list moved to a lazy in-page sub-page
Multi-tier backend performance pass — query + event-loop wins, write-path entity diffing, an untranslated partial index, and shared-Redis list caches

Sort a novel's chapters by source order — the chapter list can now follow the original site's ordering (front-end + API)
Paying patrons always get AI — the AI / machine-translate toggle is hidden on paid tiers, which always read the AI translation
Manual refreshes jump the queue — a user-triggered refresh now runs at higher priority than background sweeps
Entity occurrence counts corrected — occurrences are now counted from the English translated name in the finished chapter (word-boundary, case-sensitive) instead of the raw original, fixing badly inflated counts on common words
Sturdier scraping — improved reliability on protected sites and fixed scraper health stats; DeepSeek "needs-retranslate" flagging tightened
Notification improvements and entity-history fixes on entity creation

Stats page — per-model translation/entity breakdowns, wiki/image framework charts, and an untranslated slice
Maintenance mode — an R2-flag-driven full-screen maintenance page + mod endpoint/CLI
TTS playback fixes — instant start (no more 5-second stall then manual resume), smaller AI chunks, and an autoplay-unlock so the first chunk plays without a tap
New scraper: min-yuan.com (小原文学网)