Full rewrite of the plugin (Java and Gradle instead of Kotlin and Maven). Breaking: Paper only, Spigot/Bukkit servers are no longer supported (the 1.x jar stays available on the GitHub releases page), and config keys were renamed (migrated automatically).

• Breaking: Paper 26.3+ and Java 25 are required (paper-plugin.yml); the code is Folia-compatible (no BukkitScheduler)
• Change: config keys renamed (openai_api_key -> api-key, gpt_version -> model, chatbot_name -> chatbot-name, preffered_language -> language, timer_interval -> interval-seconds, player_dissinterest -> stop-when-ignored); old keys are migrated on first start, the config folder plugins/ai-friend/ is unchanged
• Fix: the request loop can no longer block or crash. Proper async scheduler instead of java.util.Timer, HTTP connect/read timeouts (http.*), all errors caught, exponential backoff on failures (1, 2, 4, ... max 15 minutes) with one clear log line each
• Fix: replies are posted on the main/global thread
• Fix: thread-safe bounded message queue (max-queued-messages); messages are kept when a request fails and messages arriving during a request are never lost
• Fix: requests and replies are built and parsed as proper JSON; player text is JSON-escaped and sent as clearly delimited untrusted data, never as instructions
• Fix: /aifriend reload no longer registers duplicate listeners or timers
• Change: the bot goes to sleep through a structured action reported by the model instead of text matching, and the plugin honors it only when at least 2 different players (or all online players, if fewer) took part in the batch, so one player cannot silence the bot for everyone
• New: /aifriend status (state, queue size, sleeping and backoff info); the API key is masked (e.g. sk-...abcd)
• New: permissions aifriend.use, aifriend.admin, aifriend.reload instead of an op check; commands work from the console; Brigadier tab completion; configurable command.aliases; /aifriendreload kept as an alias
• New: config.yml is commented, never overwritten and updated automatically with new options (config-version, backup config.yml.bak-v<N>); invalid values fall back to defaults with a warning
• New: new options sleep-minutes, max-queued-messages, max-reply-length, http.connect-timeout-seconds, http.read-timeout-seconds, locale, update-check, metrics
• New: messages in messages_en.yml and messages_cs.yml (MiniMessage), editable
• Change: the update checker is asynchronous, cached and compares versions semantically; the plugin version is read from the jar
• New: bStats statistics, switch off with metrics: false