@AdultSun voted No and (correctly!) pointed out that the original studio title should stay, per the guidelines:
Scene titles that have been modified by the studio after its original release should not be used as the scene title on StashDB.
So yes… per the guidelines, we should keep the original scene title. I have no beef with @AdultSun, who is 100% right about how the guidelines instruct us to handle this situation.
My issue is that this kind of case seems different, so I’m questioning whether the guideline should apply to situations like this one.
It’s not like the scene existed for some period of time with one title, and then they changed it a year later. If that were the case, I’d understand the wisdom of keeping the original title.
If the studio changes the title almost immediately after releasing the scene, it seems like the “new” title was supposed to be the “original” one all along. In other words… for some reason the “original” title was an error, and they corrected it. So as far as the studio is concerned, the (edited) title as it exists currently on their site is the “canonical” one.
My point is: In cases like this, how does it help anyone for the StashDB version to not match the studio’s site?
I suppose what I’m saying is that maybe the guideline should have an exception for scenes where the studio changes the title within the first 24 hours of release. In those cases, the StashDB scene title should reflect the studio’s edited title, since virtually no one “knows” the scene by that original title and there isn’t really any benefit to preserving that incorrect first version.
If it’s been less than a week, I think any changes should be considered as corrections and not really like a studio editorial decision to re-release a scene with a different name
Personally I think there is value in preserving original release title even if it’s changed shortly after release.
There are people (like @olddude or @Darklyter for ThePornDB) who bulk download/scrape on schedule and are likely to import that metadata. So that metadata will be indexed across the internet and having a reference to it is valuable.
Ideally both would be stored, but StashDB is running into stash-box limitation here for the moment.
And while I agree that new title would be more useful for majority people now, older title would be harder to find later, so from preservation point of view it makes sense to keep it for now and wait for the new feature to be developed before being able to store both.
I would probably add the new scene link to the existing scene entry so people can easily switch metadata with the community scraper on their local Stash.
It’s a good question, and I understand the confusion.
While not particularly common, these quick title changes happen on occasion. Often it’s a case of a temporary pre-release title replaced with a different post-release title (TeamSkeet does this), but I wonder if some studios are starting to run A-B testing to muddy the waters. I’ve also seen Nubiles scenes quickly correct the S#:E# tacked onto the end of their titles as well.
Dogma already took my answer for this one. For all of these fields where we prefer the original data, I usually point out that it’s always easier for an individual user to re-scrape the current information than it is to track down the original. So that’s why DD’s suggestion of updating the URL to the new title slug is the standard procedure in these situations. And while it isn’t as relevant to brand new scenes like this one, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to lean on a scene’s original title and/or description (including typos and weird formatting) to find missing data through the Wayback Machine or a random forum post somewhere.
My response here is that “canonical” would be a much tougher metric to judge our titles against. “Original” + “official” is hard enough as it is, but at least it narrows all of the various options and variations down to the studio’s website on the day of release. “Canonical” introduces all of these questions surrounding why a title was changed after release, whether that’s to fix a typo, change capitalization, reflect a performer’s name change, make it “part 1” of a series, improve SEO, censor a word blacklisted by their payment processor… The point is, we’re now trying to determine the studio’s motive for changing the title, and then deciding whether that motive amounts to a “canonical” change.
While Dogma and I have already explained our argument against the second sentence here, I’m not entirely opposed to your proposal of a 24 hour window. But for me it would be less about determining a more “useful” or “canonical” title and instead about establishing a clearer definition of “at time of release.”
I mentioned earlier how TS had a number of nearly immediate title changes. Best I could tell, they were all replacing a pre-release title with a new title on the day of release. The fact that I prefaced that statement with “best I could tell” is the key detail here. Just like your example scene that started this thread, I had to refer to the Wayback Machine to find a loose timeline for when the change actually occurred. Those snapshots only give me a few timestamps for when those webpages existed and what the data looked like in those moments. It doesn’t tell me the exact moment the data changed or the exact moment the scene went “live” behind the paywall. Even in a best case scenario, there’s an unavoidable fuzziness to the available evidence within these first 24 hours. So for those TS scenes, I could tell that the new title first appeared on the day of release, and that the old titles existed for several days before release. With the evidence I had, I could only assume that the title change coincided with the moment of release.
That said, this particular scene didn’t look the same to me as those TS examples. Wayback Machine is currently glitching out on me so you’ll have to rely on my memory for now. I also can’t speak to the different timezones at play here, but the scene and its webpage both appeared to go live on the morning of 2025-12-19, backed up by nrg101’s timestamp and the earliest WM snapshot I saw. The title remained unchanged through the early hours of 12-20 according to the WM link I left in the edit comments. From memory, the earliest snapshot of the new title was from late at night on 12-20. That timeline is much closer to 36 hours than 24, but all of our evidence is still several hours removed from that 24 hour mark.
So should there be some leeway for data that changes almost immediately after its release? Probably, but only as a reflection of the evidence available to us. I’m not sure that a hard 24 hour window would be the right solution either, because now we’re just shifting our focus from a vague moment of release to exactly 24 hours after that vague moment of release.
Long-term, capturing all of a scene’s title variations would still be the best way of handling all of these situations. But for now, “original” has the advantage of being the most valuable for us to preserve, has the most clearly defined line to judge against (even if our evidence is often spotty), and matches our preference for several other prominent fields (descriptions, scene aliases, cover images).
(Sorry for the late reply by the way, just busy during the holidays and wanted to give this question the time it deserved.)
I recently ran into this in the Bellesa House studio. They preface scenes with Episode ###. There are some 25ish episodes that the number is incorrect based on the current website. The other part of the title is exactly the same. There is even a few with the same number in the database “Episode 220: Lacy & Lilly” and "Episode 220: Aria And Brad”. In this instance changing the numbers doesn’t change the whole title but it does create some confusion when the database is referencing a different episode number and there are gaps in the numbers compared to the website. Why would preserving the incorrect numbers be beneficial?
I am one of the people that changes the TeamSkeet and Nubiles titles when they do the Pre/Post and Fix the S##:E## values.
Personally, I feel it also depends on how long it had been in the database too. Unless I have solid evidence via way back machine that it was changed immediately, I usually won’t change it if it’s more than a few months old.
There are also ones where the title changed before the edit was approved, which I find funny.
There are those that I will put in edits to change where it is obvious that the sequencing is in to direct reference to something they messed up and fixed. Irregardless of the time frame. Off the top of my head “of the month” scenes are one of these. They always release with the wrong S:E code, they are always updated to a new code within a day or two with an updated URL and redirect on the old one. It tends to be people who can scrape prerelease that snag the old code.
With that being said I guess it depends on what the change is. I am more inclined to saying yes to changes where the studio fixes what they, themselves, have established as the expected info in their titles vs them fixing spelling/case later down the line.
Editing to add I would not put a hard limit on time. Even we cannot guarantee when it may get archived or if archives will even succeed.