This is something that has always sort of bugged as I built my farms. I find that when I play on the server and really any server in general, I like to be always doing something, no matter how random it may be, and that takes me to the problem of mob spawner ranges, I've think that it would be an interesting idea to change around the range of mob spawners so that they are always active no matter how far away the player might be. Though I also think that it would be reasonable to reduce the spawn rates of the spawners at a certain distance away instead of turning them off entirely. This means that we don't have to spend time aimlessly jogging around a spawner, this is especially true for shulker farms which can be built really high up to avoid having the shulkers teleport everywhere. So in summary: Make mob spawners work no matter how far away but at a decreased rate when out of range
The problem with this is that it would begin to cause an insane amount of lag if all spawners were active all the time. Also I don't believe it is that easy to edit spawner ranges in the way that you have described
I'm not very good with editing servers and plugins and such so I can see why it would be difficult to edit spawners, but I'm pretty sure the islands would unload when players are not on them, so if nobody is on the island, the farms and spawners and such wouldn't be loaded in and causing lag unless a lot of people were online at once.
There is indeed the lag problem with doing this, as well as the fact that people would try to afk more than they already do and we don't want that to happen. I can still mention it to other staff though. :d
