Nether portal linking for new portals

The Nether Hub is a unique site on Tech Fortress, an ever-growing system not found on many other servers. Founded by ibbo2000, the hub is used to travel long distances quickly. Most players often build a nether hub not too long after establishing a home to quickly meet up with other players on the server.

Due to Minecraft's singleplayer design, a common problem for new players is that their new portal would link to somebody else's portal in the nether. Going back through this linked portal causes the new player to end up in somebody else's house, which is likely hundreds of blocks away from their home! The only way to resolve this issue was by manually creating a new portal in the nether, which often had to be done by ibbo2000. As one might expect, if ibbo isn't online, the player would have to wait until he comes online and has time to fix the issue.

After a few years of proposing different ideas to resolve this issue, Tech Fortress now has a solution to mitigate the need for manual intervention:

Newly-created portals in the overworld will attempt to avoid linking up with existing nether portals. In other words, new portals created in the overworld will more likely also create a new portal in the nether.

This should reduce the issues of new portals being linked to existing portals in the nether, allowing new players to venture into the nether, and if they survive, to return back to their home via the new nether portal.

Alert: Potential world corruption

From January 9, 2019 to January 11, 2019, some data loss and possible corruption occurred on the Tech Fortress server. If you find any corrupted chunks or similar, please /report these areas immediately and avoid making any modifications in this area. If a region is corrupted, the entire region may need to be rolled back.

Update: Some statistics and advancements for players were lost and were rolled back manually. PlayerData and chunk regions seemed to have avoided corruption, likely due to the server being smarter (not just blindly overwriting) with these files.

During the aforementioned period, the server's disk was full. I was in the middle of changing the backup strategy, and while I was transitioning to the new one, I still had the old one going. So when it attempted to make a backup this time around, it filled the disk, leaving no free space for any new saves. I am currently unaware of any tools that can scan the world and find corrupted regions that have been updated to the 1.13 format. If you know of any, please let me know here in the comments or on the server.

A full, relatively recent and working backup of the server exists to restore any corrupted areas.