Can someone explain what these black spots are on the live map, I know they aren't unexplored spots because I can walk into the spot and it stays. I've tried refreshing, zooming out zooming in and nothing helps.
It typically takes a range of hours/days to update in my experience. A server restart might update it, but that's just a guess.
Walking through a chunk no longer causes it to render on the live map. You must actually break/place a block to trigger it to render. This was done because the livemap was found to be a huge source of lag on the servers, so we lowered the amount of rendering it does.
Awesome, I was wondering this also. Looks like I'll be sure to drop a torch around while exploring. I highly recommend JourneyMap mod as well, auto maps places you've been and the waypoint functionality is incredible in the wilderness.