If you are using Pligg to run your own Digg like site, you would have already noticed that it is painfully slow. I have been running Pligg on a shared hosting and it was killing everything else even with a small user base! It seems that Pligg team is beginning to address the performance issues in the latest beta version released yesterday.

Here are some of the key new features in Pligg 9.5,

1. Un-vote - Now users can un-vote stories they have voted for

2. Fixes for IIS - Fixes for the IIS cookie redirect bug.

3. Image upload module - Upload images and use the thickbox javascript library to view them.

4. Reporting/Burying Stories - Users can bury stories that are spam, inaccurate etc etc. Burying a story grays it out to signify you have buried it.

5. Major database query enhancements - A quick estimation shows that the database calls in version 9.1 was 170+ and now it’s 50-60. This should substantially increase the speed of your Pligg site.

6. Story page tabs - Each story page now uses tabs. There are 3 tabs, comments, who voted, and a new feature, related stories.

7. Upgrade to Template Lite 2.1 - Upgraded Pligg to the current version of Template Lite.

8. Upgrade to ezSQL 2.03 - upgraded to the latest version of ezSQL for better mysql query handling.