Falling through the ground

[Themerion]

In some places I've discovered that it's possible to fall through the ground and die (and it has been like this for a long time). Perhaps this is common knowledge for you? A spot in particular is the entrance to the sewers right behind the tavern. All you have to do is to walk up from the sewers, and just before the stairs ends push towards the side of the stairs...

This is starting to get quite annoying, as it's my most common source of deaths... (since death realm grew and /respawn was removed, dying is much more something that one doesn't want) 

[Karyuu]

It's a known and annoying problem, aye Right now if you know that a certain spot can cause such a fall, try to jump over it.

[The Wandering Djinn]

I hate the places like that in the Windowless Tower, and the first stairway out of the Laanx Dungeons that is always black, and flickers like the Tardis in Dr Who, as it starts the process of leaving where it is currently at and is on it's way to where it will be next.

[Croconil]

Yeah. Everyone has been having this problem for a long time. Hopefully the devs will find a magical way to make it better soon

[Gharan]

Any ideas whether it will be fixed for the next update?

[eldoth_terevan]

It is entered in the bug tracker and will be addressed when someone can mod the map. More irking is the falling through the ground in combat issue, I think. But just avoid those areas for now...

[Lanarel]

Any ideas whether it will be fixed for the next update?

As many of these problems survived several updates, my guess would be no. Some hints on the cause can be found here:
http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=23617.msg259907#msg259907
which at least had the problem with the ladder in the tower and the laanx well dissappear. For the other known places, just be carefull not to walk into the gap . For example, the sewer exit gap is to the side of the stairs, and can easily be avoided by walking up the stairs all the way to the rock, and then follow the rock to the side.
I am not sure, but I vaguely remember that these problems are related to the 3D engine, meaning that devs wait for the engine to become better instead of wasting time patching up all locations one by one.

I see someone posted in the meantime:

It is entered in the bug tracker and will be addressed when someone can mod the map. More irking is the falling through the ground in combat issue, I think. But just avoid those areas for now...

Being entered in the bugtracker does not necessarilly mean it will be solved anytime soon (not tm), judging from the above linked thread, the submission date of that bug (march 2005), or the version in which it was first found (0.3.008). It already survived 8 updates.

[Khaki]

These problems are art and 3D engine issues. And due to that, the devs can't really do anything about them. People are free to fix or make workarounds for the map files themselves (they're in xml format and are called world in each .zip file) and tell us how they did it so others can benefit.

AFAIK the problem is due to wierd portals or misaligned portals or bad parameters in the map file.