1.8.6 includes an important security update so we recommend updating ASAP.
With 1.8.6 Etherpad now provides a method to copy pads that uses roughly 10% of the computational resources to copy a pad without any previous history. See: copyPadWithoutHistory
A postgres bug existed in 1.8.5 so if you are a postgres user we recommend updating to 1.8.6.
Various other changes are available in the small changelog. As always our focus is on ease of implementation, scale, stability and consistency throughout the editor. Sorry if you hope to get new bells and whistles with this release, things should be stable with 1.8.6 which means we can shift our focus to 1.9 which is scheduled to be our final release during 2020 and will have some major new changes we are pretty excited to announce.
Thanks for supporting Etherpad and being involved with the project <3