Note: Since some people apparently refuse to read through the text below, prefer to panic and then ask me for a solution of a problem they only assumed despite the fact that it is written below that there is no reason to worry about anything, and then come running to me with fatalistic comments about their stuff in the skylands and start planning for the apocalypse, here is the TL:DR for you:

I will NOT delete the skylands.

You will NOT loose your stuff if you have a lot there.

There is no reason to worry.

We all liked and used the skylands as they were created some months ago. They were created to allow a bigger space for larger constructions. There should be little land or nothing in them. There are several issues with the skylands now however:

• I cannot regenerate them when they are abandoned. Regenerating them creates a normal word. Same if I would simply delete the save files on the server.
• It is troublesome to delete them once a lot is abandoned. I need to “delete” the contents so that it becomes a void at least. However doing so lags the server so much that all users are disconnected for some 30-60 seconds.
• When 1.2 comes out, all lots will have a 256+ building height, meaning twice as much as now.

The only solution is to simply let it ‘die’ by not giving out additional lots there and hoping that someday we will have an alternative. I have a similar issue with the flatlands by the way, but the lots are much smaller so there is no issue with deleting them. It just takes much longer for me to do it since I have to first select & delete the land above 64 blocks and then do set to soil for below 64 blocks instead of just typing //regen.

Since 1.2 will be out hopefully this or next month, I will not do anything to see what happens. However it is likely that I will in the long run deprecate the skylands just as the ‘old world’.