BlockHermit

The current plans are that the nether resets for 1.16, and will reset again after a month or two. There will be no player claims allowed during the first reset, it will be used only as a resource nether. What happens after that will depend on what options we have. There won't be a dedicated resource...

Yes, plant growth works normally in loaded chunks.

View distance is currently only 4 (chunk player is in, plus the next 4). However, chunks out of range are cached for a short while so they won't unload instantly.

I joined the server to check after I saw this mentioned in Discord, sounds seemed to be fine for me at the time.

These sort of random, transient glitches are almost impossible to diagnose and if they don't fix themselves will be cured by a restart.

Just before the Market was opened, I set a limit on the number of shops a player could own in case of future performance problems. Turns out the limit had been reached already....

I'll increase the limit a little for now.

Authoritative answer - Currently (and this may change) the hard-despawn radius is 64, and the soft-despawn is 32. I've been considering increasing this by 16 each due to recent performance improvements, I've held off doing this so far as I don't know how well 1.16 will work when it's released, which...

The Nether will be totally reset when we update to 1.16

Have to decide later about what happens afterwards, as the new nether is likely to be heavily mined and looted and we'll need to decide how best to arrange things. A resource nether is unlikely, but there are other ways to manage the issue.

It's a problem with the current Paper build. It will be resolved during the first restart after the host uploads a new version.

Seems you were killed by hitting the worldborder, that's where all your items were dropped. I've put them back into your inventory anyway, some of them were outside and couldn't have been picked up.

Hmm, thought that was something that 1.15 was supposed to have fixed. X talks about it in one of the snapshot videos.