Using the website as an example collegefuckparties and scene 81e13596-725f-4716-955a-0368fcc59b36.
Regarding the release date of the episode. It has changed on the site several times at different times. Now there is no date there at all. The real release date is before 2007 (Student Sex Parties, here 20070127 is the first saved page, but here it is already Student Sex Parties), filmed in the summer of 2006. The one indicated is according to the state of the site in 2020. What to do in this case? As far as I know, the project’s policy is to prioritize what is currently on the site(now-nothing?)). Although, in this case, we will have the wrong age of the performers in the scene.
This is just one example, but the case is quite typical for many sites and scenes.
p.s. quite a strange limitation of 2 links for new users
The earliest known and confirmable date is actually the prefered date. Not the current site date since as you said that can change frequently. It will also throw off things like age calculations if suddenly 5+ years are added.
Editing it to add this actually applies to all data including descriptions, titles and other such items. The earliest is prefered.
This actually raises an interesting issue for re-releases/re-masters. I have been dating them based on the new release date (edit: I re-read the Preferred Dates page posted above as it has been a while and this does seem to align with the guidance noted for re-releases), but as you’ve both pointed out, that leads to the wrong age of the performers. One studio that I focus on started a few months ago re-releasing much earlier scenes (10-15 years old) at higher resolution and with extra footage and I’ve been adding them as new scenes, as they are truly re-releases and have different p-hashes and durations.
It would be helpful if there were another date field on a scene to capture an original release date. If that value were null then it could be assumed that the scene date is the original date, or vice versa.
I just searched GitHub and found that a Production Date field was added to StashDB a few months ago, but there’s still an open enhancement issue to add a corresponding date to Stash, so it would probably have to be manually entered after submitting the draft from Stash.