Since the new server change, I noticed something I'm pretty sure wasn't there before... a visual cutoff point that occurs before the "far" limit.

Below are two screen shots of my town.

On the left, a screenshot of my town in minetown. On the Right, my backup copy.

It looks... bad. I'm not sure if this was intentionally changed or not, but I'd like to see it returned to it's original settings. We have many large towns, usually much larger than mine, it takes from the appeal of them.

I believe on the old server it was the same... but I may be mistaken

As mentioned in another topic:

Render distance have been decreased to increase performance. It should be increased whenever we find another way or that bukkit/minecraft improves to support more players in SMP in a less laggy way.