A significant change is taking place on Tech Fortress - and no, 1.13 still isn't out yet. (Though to be honest, I quite like the slower update cadence.)
The first of these is the removal of spawn posts.
In short, everybody (without having a bed spawn) will spawn at the global world spawn point.
The decision to drop spawn posts was made to favor the global server community over the ease of traveling to uninhabited lands. That, and the fact that a global spawn point is in fact a vanilla multiplayer functionality. Spawn posts make more sense if Tech Fortress were to emulate a vanilla singleplayer experience. But what would be the point of a multiplayer server if all it were intended to be is just singleplayer with a chatbox?
Spawn posts
Spawn posts were implemented a couple years ago to deal with the issue of new players having to travel far and great lengths in search of fresh resources to get started. This is probably the most significant contrast between a vanilla singleplayer game vs. a vanilla multiplayer game; the older a multiplayer world becomes, the further new players must go to visit new and unexplored terrain, which is often the source of fresh resources to get started.Tech Fortress' history of solving this problem has changed many times. When Tech Fortress was publicly released, new players would be randomly teleported to a location, so they can get started right away. Subsequent respawns would occur at the world's main spawn point, so the player would always have a consistent path to return to their settlement in case their bed spawn failed. The primary issue with this solution was that the plugin employed did not always work, nor did players generally survive to make a bed before they died. This also was a very singleplayer-focused solution - friends who would join the server would be separated several hundreds or thousands of blocks apart.
As such, a new solution was put in place. Roughly a few months later, the random teleportation plugin was removed, and the "water transportation" system was built, allowing players to traverse roughly 600 blocks in the cardinal direction of their choosing via a boat in a river-like tunnel, with speeds comparable to traveling via minecart. However, this system was broken when the 1.9 boats arrived. The remains of this system can still be seen today, although it is now permanently closed due to the aforementioned boat changes.
Shortly before the 1.9 changes arrived, spawn posts were implemented. Instead of a global, unchanging spawn point, players would spawn at a spawn post. The posts were very minimal, and automatically generated with signs. As new players claimed near a spawn post and consumed resources such as trees, ores, and unclaimed areas, a new spawn post would be designated as the place where new players spawned at. This provided a solution such that players have access to fresh resources, while any friends that also join spawn next to them.
So why was this scrapped? In nearly all survival servers, there are two types of players - those who stay long-term for years, and those who effectively quit after a few months.
In nearly all cases, new players who join will encounter the long-term players in chat. If they wish to meet these long-term players, they will often be far away from them, due to the nature of spawn posts always attempting to spawn players next to fresh resources and in uninhabited areas; these places are generally away from where long-term players live. Therefore, having spawn posts is in fact worse than having a global, unchanging spawn point, if one wishes to meet the existing community of players!
Thus, the decision to drop spawn posts was made to favor the global server community over the ease of traveling to uninhabited lands. That, and the fact that a global spawn point is in fact a vanilla multiplayer functionality. Spawn posts make more sense if Tech Fortress were to emulate a vanilla singleplayer experience. But what would be the point of a multiplayer server if all it were intended to be is just singleplayer with a chatbox?