Missing Performers: Clarify Tagging Expectations

StashDB Ministry of Truth
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The current guideline for missing performers on scenes is pretty clear about being required to note in your edit comment why performers are missing on a scene.

Please note in your edit comment why any performers are not included in your submission.

There are plenty of situations where you may not be able to add a performer to a scene:

  • The performer is known but does not yet exist on StashDB (in which case it should be added to StashDB and the scene)
  • You have reason to believe the performers listed in your source are not correct
  • The performer is not listed in any of your sources

We also have a couple of tags for indicating on a scene when performers are missing:

And those tags seem to pretty nicely fill the gap covered in the three situations noted above for missing performers. My proposal is that we update the quoted part of the guidelines above to require usage of these tags.

Please note in your edit comment why any performers are not included in your submission and add the relevant “Missing Performer” tags (Female, Male, Trans) to the scene.

I believe this would better clarify the requirement to include all performers on a scene and would make reviewing the third and most common situation (no idea who the performer is) a bit better. It serves as a minor signal that there was an attempt to identify performers and has a side benefit of reinforcing the usage of those tags.

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Per existing guidelines this is not a valid case for not adding performer. If it’s credited or otherwise mentioned in the source you are required to create the performer profile before adding a scene.

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I didn’t mean to imply that was a valid situation to not add a performer to a scene, it’s just one of the basic 3 where people don’t. This guideline modification doesn’t make that situation any less likely to happen because, as you said, it shouldn’t really happen in the first place.

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I was just clarifying so that people don’t assume it was a valid use case. My comment was in no way suggesting that suggested addition to the guideline was not good because of it.

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Should this apply to performers who are in the scene but not mentioned in the details, title, URL, or a linked webpage?

My reading of the current version, which would carry over to the proposed updated version, is that the answer is “no” (i.e. if a performer is in the video but there is no named reference to them in any of the studio text, no Missing ([...]) tag or explanation is required.) I’m not sure what’s ideal, but I lean toward a choice that makes the answer to this question “yes”.

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When I had initially written this up, I thought that the case of a missing performer that’s not called out by the studio was expected to be included in the edit comments, but after reading it again a couple more times that’s definitely not the case. I think part of that might be able to be fixed by changing the order of the sentences in the guideline and tweaking some wording.

All performers listed in the title, details, URL, or a linked webpage should be included when adding or editing a scene. This includes male performers in straight scenes.

This just removes the word “active” from “active performers”. Based on my observations, there hasn’t been much of a distinction between “active” and “inactive” performers when it comes to scene creation, probably because a large portions of scenes being added today are not recent. The note reaffirming that male performers in straight scenes should still be included I think continues to be necessary, especially since Stash itself provides the option to not scrape male performers.

In some cases performers who appear in scenes are not listed on the studio website, in those cases finding names for missing performers on recommended databases (IAFD, DATA18, etc.) is greatly encouraged, but often not required.

This sentence was originally last but has been moved up to the second spot. I added a bit to the start of the sentence to indicate that not all studios list all performers on their site and as such there are cases where not all performers can be added to a scene. Linking to IAFD and DATA18 might be useful here since not everyone is familiar with them, but in the end I see that piece as the most minor part of this change. In theory this also reinforces the accepted community guidance that non-sex performers in a scene can still be added as performers, though that might benefit from being called out more explicitly (or even have it’s own guideline, there’s some nuance around there).

Please note in your edit comment why any performers are not included in your submission and add the relevant “Missing Performer (Female, Male, Trans)” tags to the scene.

Having this sentence come last should properly indicate that both listed performers and non-listed performers should be noted in the edit comments. This also gives people the opportunity to question the validity of performers listed in their sources in the event that they are incorrect and indicate it in the history to everyone else.

Combining that all together gives this proposed guideline for missing performers on scenes:

All performers listed in the title, details, URL, or a linked webpage should be included when adding or editing a scene. This includes male performers in straight scenes. In some cases performers who appear in scenes are not listed on the studio website, in those cases finding names for missing performers on recommended databases (IAFD, DATA18, etc.) is greatly encouraged, but often not required. Please note in your edit comment why any performers are not included in your submission and add the relevant “Missing Performer (Female, Male, Trans)” tags to the scene.

I’m open to any additional feedback on these changes.

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The third sentence still feels a little wishy-washy to me, how about this?

In the cases where performers who appear in scenes are not listed on the studio website you are encouraged (but not required) to find them by cross-referencing other metadata databases such as IAFD, DATA18, GEVI, etc.

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