Red Light District / Club Red Light

StashDB Ministry of Truth
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Guidelines

Split scenes from Red Light District, distributed via Club Red Light (clubredlight.com, now defunct), that were released within the period March 2009 – December 2013 are eligible for submission to StashDB. Scenes outside this window require independent positive evidence of a first-party digital release.

Submitting a Scene

The burden is on the submitter to explain why a scene is eligible – not on voters to independently research it.

  1. Search the Wayback Machine for an archived scene page at clubredlight.com. If found, use it as your primary source and include a link in your edit comment.
  2. If no archived scene page can be found, note in your edit comment that the movie’s release date falls within the March 2009–December 2013 window when Club Red Light offered individual scene downloads. Use IAFD or Data18 for metadata and apply the Missing or Removed tag.

A submission with only IAFD/Data18 sources and no eligibility explanation in the edit comment is not sufficient and may be rejected.

For Red Light District scenes outside the March 2009–December 2013 window, the window argument alone does not apply – independent evidence of a first-party digital release is required.

Voting

A Red Light District scene submission should not be rejected solely because no archived Club Red Light scene page can be found. The absence of a Wayback Machine snapshot is expected and does not constitute evidence of ineligibility on its own.

A submission may still be rejected for insufficient eligibility explanation, missing or incorrect metadata, no sources provided, or other standard reasons.

Deletion

For recently created scenes without any eligibility evidence or edit comment explanation, rejection or deletion is reasonable.

For scenes created before the current split scene guidelines were established, the practical case for deletion is weak. The guidelines are focused on submission quality and preventing duplicates going forward, not retroactive cleanup.

Sourcing

Where an archived Club Red Light scene page exists on the Wayback Machine, it should be used as the primary source and may be used as the studio link. Where none can be found, IAFD or Data18 may be used for metadata, with the Missing or Removed tag applied. Third-party storefronts (Bang, Adult Empire, HotMovies, etc.) are not acceptable as a studio link.

Reasoning

For any scene on StashDB, positive evidence of eligibility is required. For most scenes, the studio link satisfies this automatically. For split scenes where the distribution site is defunct – as is the case with Club Red Light – the normal evidence path is broken, so other forms of evidence are needed.

Proof (ideal): a link to an archived Club Red Light scene page, a watermark on the video itself, or a contemporaneous press release or announcement.

A good case (sufficient when proof is unavailable): a release date that falls within the March 2009–December 2013 window, a blog article or social media post referencing the release, or a personal account of having downloaded the scene during that period.

A good case, clearly stated in the edit comment, satisfies the submitter’s burden of due diligence. The March 2009–December 2013 window is established because that is the period for which there is positive evidence that Club Red Light systematically offered individual Red Light District scene downloads to members.

Background

Site Timeline

  • Pre-2009: Club Red Light existed as a catalog for physical DVD/VHS sales, with some full-movie streaming from 2004. No evidence of split scene downloads during this period.
  • March 2009 – February 2012: Club Red Light launched as a modern membership site. Split scene downloads are first evidenced from this period; Wayback Machine coverage is spotty due to URL tracker issues.
  • March 2012 – December 2013: Site revamped, with more stable Wayback Machine coverage. Split scene downloads continue. Last content updates are from December 2013.
  • Post-2013: Site goes dormant and eventually defunct sometime after 2016.

Research

@AdultSun established through Wayback Machine research that only 7 scenes in the Club Red Light v4 archive pre-date March 2009, all tagged to sub-studios rather than Club Red Light directly – no evidence that Club Red Light retroactively released split scenes from older Red Light District titles.

@sdbtj confirmed that the split scene model was systematic: an archived Club Red Light page for I’ve Been Sodomized #3 states “every one of our videos have 4-5 downloadable scenes,” and a performer page for Keeani Lei shows ten titles available on the site.

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First off, thank you for looking deeper into this studio’s history. It’s a little hard to follow your points though because it doesn’t include any direct links to examples from the Wayback Machine. I’ve done my best digging around the WM myself to verify some of your claims, and this is what I’ve come up with. For the TLDR, skip to the Conclusion heading at the bottom.

History

  1. ClubRedLight.com has existed since at least Sep. 2002, apparently serving as an online catalog for physical DVD and VHS sales
  2. By July 2004, they start offering some limited downloads / streams of full movies. There’s a mention on the homepage of a paid membership giving you access to the last 2 weeks of uploads, but nothing about split scenes.
  3. Earliest evidence of split scenes is from March 2009 when CRL has been revamped into a modern membership site and v3 is added to their URLs. There are a handful of new sub-studios listed alongside DVD releases. Snapshots are spotty and at least somewhat broken though, mostly due to their reliance on trackers added to the end of URLs. The most stable homepage URL for WM snapshots seems to be this one for whatever reason, but navigating within WM is still difficult.
  4. CRL is revamped again in March 2012, fixing a lot of the WM-related issues. Sub-studios still exist but all DVD listings / credits appear to have been removed. This version of the site doesn’t see any more updates past Dec. 2013 and goes completely defunct sometime after 2016.

Split Scene Timeline

From these four versions of the website, we only have evidence of RLD releasing split scenes from March 2009 through Dec. 2013. By April 2012 (about 1 month into v4 of CRL), the oldest scene has a 2007-07-09 release date. This is followed by a long gap before more regular releases start up in 2008-03-12. By Oct. 2016 (just before it goes defunct), the oldest scenes remain the same.

In total, only 7 scenes from CRL v4 pre-date the March 2009 launch of v3, all of which are tagged with a sub-studio instead of ClubRedLight.com as well. I suspect those sub-studios got a head start as standalone memberships before the launch of v3, so I don’t see any evidence of RLD digging into their archive to release split scenes from older movies.

Conclusion

I don’t think it’s fair to say, “Red Light District used to offer split scenes themselves, therefore all of their scenes are eligible.” The current guidelines do not confer blanket eligibility to an entire studio that way. Using the lack of evidence a scene is ineligible as a valid justification would make StashDB impossible to moderate. You need positive evidence that a scene is eligible, whether that’s through a Wayback Machine snapshot or something else. A movie’s existence on IAFD or Data18 does not count since they both track physical- and VOD-exclusive releases that are ineligible for StashDB.

However, based on an hour or two on the Wayback Machine, I think it is fair to say that split scenes from roughly March. 2009 through Dec. 2013 are likely eligible for StashDB and should be safe to add without a WM link. That’s a pretty narrow window though, and I doubt you’ll see many voters in the queue who are aware of it, so submitting RLD scenes is still going to be a challenge moving forward.

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@sdbtj deserves the credit for the heavy Wayback Machine research; my role was primarily trying to codify and document what had come out of the discussion in the original StashDB edit.

I intentionally left out a direct link to that edit here to avoid derailing the discussion with the vote itself, but I should have flagged it to you separately – sorry about that. For reference only, and which I am not trying to relitigate: here’s the Edit with comment chain. sdbtj’s final comment there is where the key findings were posted.

Your timeline research is genuinely useful and more granular than anything we had before. I’m happy to update the post to reflect the March 2009 - December 2013 window rather than the blanket eligibility framing, if that’s the direction you’d like to take it.

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Thank you @CmdrSpazzbo for capturing/codifying and @AdultSun for piecing together some of the site’s history. Here is a brain dump; perhaps someone will find something in here useful:

Comprehensiveness of public-facing site

For the later iterations of CRL (March 2009+ and March 2012+), I believe that there was very little, if any, content entirely hidden behind the paywall. This is because in my experience, sites that publicly list lots of content with structure like specific release dates, tags, and searchability, rarely keep the existence of any members-area content secret. Exceptions:

  • A scene or two here or there isn’t visible publicly for what would appear to be technical reasons or perhaps some sort of obscure contractual reasons (example)
  • Re-distributed scenes sometimes aren’t listed publicly by the re-distributor, e.g. PornPros and IIRC at least some of the “TeamSkeet X” releases, during the pandemic.
  • Some sites advertise on their public pages (especially the “join” page) that some nebulous type of “bonus” or “extra” content is available to members. Sometimes this is stuff like BTS or scenes that didn’t turn out so well, other times it’s third party content that they probably got for very cheap.

Early membership site

In addition to this, beginning around Nov. 2002, clubredlight.com gained a membership option promising “FAST CLEAR VIDEOS” and “4 NEW MOVIES EVERY MONTH”

They show one Sample Movie Page that suggests that individual scenes were available for download or streaming.

They also advertised enigmatic “channels” under different categories, such as CLIMAXXX WITH SOUND: 7 Squirting Channels.Sex is suppose to end with a mind blowing squirting orgasm.....

Observations from video files

I found my old backups of the content from this iteration of the site. So far it’s looking like most of the videos are redistributions of third party content, so scenes where DATA18 or IAFD lists Red Light District as the studio may not have been available on here. Also, all of these videos have a Club Red Light watermark on them, which is clear evidence that they are eligible for StashDB. No clue whether any earlier CRL videos have such watermarks, but that would be pretty handy.

First-party VOD

They offered VOD rental downloads of their movies through store.redlightdistrictvideo.com. I’m not sure when it became available, but it seems to have run until mid-2004.

Peak VOD count that I found a snapshot of is 147 results. Checking count at various snapshots against IAFD, and spot checking some titles, it looks like they probably offered almost all of their studio’s titles through this system, and it looks like new releases were available for VOD same-day as DVD release.

However, this might all be moot because the downloads used DivX rental DRM (actual DRM, not DIVX the 48 hour self-destructing phsyical disc format), so one would need to have either stripped that DRM (no clue whether that’s possible at this point) or screen recorded (would this still be eligible for StashDB?).

First-party VOD, Second-time around

There was a www.redlightvod.com referenced in this AVN article from March 2007. I don’t know anything about this site. I think I looked for it on archive.org before and found no snapshots, but I can’t even do that right now because my IP has been rate limited for doing too much research. BTW, a Google search for site:avn.com red light district is a good way to dig up leads.

Conclusion

I’m spending way more time and brain power on this than it deserves.

Next time I see a Red Light District scene creation without a link to evidence of first-party digital release in the edit queue, I’ll probably either try to ignore it, or I’ll ask the author to explain why they believe that the scene is eligible and they’ll say something that boils down to “trust me bro” and people will vote it through. Pardon my cynicism.

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For me, that’s the most actionable advice I can give right now. TJ’s additional research suggests there may be older VOD / streams that could also be eligible, but our confidence in being able to prove that any given split scene saw that kind of release is much lower outside that 5-year window. Full movie releases are a different story but I didn’t spend much time finding specifics on that side.

Realistically, this is closer to what it’ll look like in the queue. Someone will grab a scene from Bang / Adult Empire / HotMovies or some random torrent / forum / tubesite, scrape whatever they can find in two seconds, and submit it to StashDB with the comment “new scene”.

The key thing to keep in mind when voting is that it’s not actually your responsibility to know whether a particular scene is eligible or not, regardless of the (lack of) effort put into the edit. It’s the OP’s responsibility to explain how it’s eligible. Seeing any split scene with only IAFD / Data18 / Bang as a source is more than enough justification to downvote with a comment along the lines of, “No proof of eligibility, needs evidence of a 1st party source.”

That was part of the point of being more strict about proper sourcing in the queue as well: clarifying that we expect submitters to make a proper review as easy as possible for the voters, not for the voters to spend an inordinate amount of time independently verifying everything a submitter failed to explain.

The reverse example is someone taking the time to find a snapshot in the Wayback Machine, failing to find anything, cobbling together what they can from IAFD and Data18, and finally commenting, “Couldn’t find a working snapshot in the Wayback Machine, but movie was released within the window when this studio offered downloads of individual scenes.” The submission could be otherwise identical to my first example, but including an explanation like that should still be enough to prove the OP did their due diligence of asserting the scene’s eligibility.

As for deleting scenes that were already created… frankly I don’t worry about them too much.

If it’s a scene that was just created a day or two ago, then sure, I don’t have any problem deleting those. No collection of fingerprints to worry about, no excuse for the OP or the voters who should know better, and an opportunity to send a message by leaving a comment on the creation request explaining why it isn’t eligible and shouldn’t have been approved.

But if it was a scene created years ago, possibly before we established those split scene guidelines… I don’t really see the point in deleting those. Sure, keeping them around could be seen as a mixed message and the guidelines would justify removing them, but it’s also unlikely removing them would do much to dispel that mixed message either.

The original intention of the current split scene policy is to prevent a flood of duplicate entries from every VOD marketplace out there, all of which would likely need to be fixed whenever StashDB gets support for release groups and collections. Unlike ineligible studios / performers / aliases, there are no concerns about liability, legality, doxxing, etc. We’re just managing our focus and priorities. So ultimately, I just think it’s counterproductive to spend a bunch of time and effort looking at old split scene submissions and researching their eligibility just to save ourselves the time and effort of fixing them later.

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Sorry, a little off-topic but one last thing. Thanks for providing the link to the comment thread that started this conversation. I’ve read through it now and I believe I’ve already addressed the broader points in that discussion already, but I think it’s worth doubling-back to clarify this part again:

“If the scene did not have a first party digital release, then it is not eligible.” And: “If a split scene is no longer available from the studio’s website or if the studio’s website no longer exists, it can still be added to StashDB.”

The first sentence establishes the general eligibility requirement. The second is the intentional policy solution to a specific evidentiary problem: when a studio’s website is defunct, proof of a first party digital release is structurally unattainable. This is not an accidental contradiction – it’s a deliberate carve-out, and the “or” is doing real work.

I wrote that particular phrasing — “If a split scene is no longer available from the studio’s website or if the studio’s website no longer exists” — as a reflection of my definition for the Missing or Removed tag. In both places, it’s just meant to be a slightly more specific description than, “If it used to be available but now it’s not.”

The last phrase — “…it can still be added to StashDB” — was also not meant to be read as a guarantee. Overall, I’m only trying to say that a scene’s current unavailability doesn’t mean it’s automatically ineligible. That’s an important point of clarification for me because I’ve always seen the preservation of lost or difficult-to-find data one of the most valuable aspects of StashDB. I would never want us to remove a scene from StashDB just because a company went bankrupt, or a studio purged it to appease a credit card company, or whatever.

I spend a lot of time trying to be as precise with my language as possible, but the language in the guidelines is still not meant to be read like legalese. That’s also why we decided early on to call them “guidelines” instead of “rules” or “laws.” There are always weird edge cases that we can’t be expected to predict or account for, so often the best we can do is provide a framework to help editors make their own judgment instead of trying to set hard requirements for absolutely everything.

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Something I’m overdue to address from the original edit comment thread:

I agree that literal proof may be unattainable. A more accurate way of phrasing what I think we should expect here is “a case for the existence of a first party digital release at some point in time”.

Some type of proof is the ideal way to make that case. Examples of what I consider proof include: link to an archived studio page, watermark in the video content itself, or a very specific press release. Examples of what I consider good cases, but not proof, include: “Club Red Light was making most of the studio’s 2009 - 2011 releases available as split-scene downloads, and the DVD release of this scene was around that time”, or “I had a membership back in the day and downloaded this scene”.

I agree. With my current knowledge, I wouldn’t have deleted those scenes, but I think it was reasonable to do at the time, and it’s not a particularly tragic loss.

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@sdbtj “a case for the existence of a first-party digital release” is better framing than what I had. I’ll use that in the revision.

@AdultSun Before I update the OP, I wanted to ask about one thing from your post 2: “You need positive evidence that a scene is eligible, whether that’s through a Wayback Machine snapshot or something else.” Is that the operative standard you’d want voters applying when they encounter a split scene submission (perhaps regardless of studio)? If so, I’d like to include it in the revised post – I just want to make sure I’m characterizing its weight correctly rather than overstating it.

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Yeah, I’d say that’s true for any scene. Typically the studio link does that work for you, but a situation like RLD (split scene from a defunct studio) needs something else. Stuff like TJ’s earlier examples (WM snapshot, blog article, social media post, personal download, release date within the right window, etc.) can accomplish the same thing.

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I’ve updated the OP to reflect the discussion. Key changes:

  • Eligibility is now scoped to the March 2009 – December 2013 window rather than the blanket framing
  • The reasoning section now reflects the correct operative standard: positive evidence of eligibility is required for any scene; the window and other evidence types satisfy that requirement when a direct Wayback Machine link isn’t available
  • Incorporated @sdbtj’s proof vs. good case framing for what submitters need to provide
  • Restructured into Guidelines (actionable) → Reasoning → Background, so someone arriving mid-queue can find what they need without reading the full history
  • Distinguished Red Light District (the studio) from Club Red Light (the distribution site) consistently throughout

Thanks to @AdultSun and @sdbtj for the research and the corrections that made this possible.

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