StashDB Contribution Guidelines
Welcome to the StashDB Guidelines!
This will serve as a guide and reference document for all contributors to StashDB. It hosts both tips for new contributors as well as the guidelines themselves. Being familiar with both will help in getting your edits approved. If something is missing or doesn’t make sense, please ask in either #stashdb-general or the #ministry-of-truth on Discord.
This website is very much a work in progress at this time so watch for significant updates in the coming days. It is hosted with GitHub Pages, so please direct any suggestions for improving this website to the StashDB-Docs repo as a PR or Issue. Feel free to contact @AdultSun on Discord with any suggestions as well.
Table of Contents
StashDB Overview
StashDB is our shared public instance of the Stash-Box software. It hosts information about a wide variety of scenes, studios, and performers that can be easily pulled into your own installation of Stash. It does not host any video files or link to any unofficial downloads.
Primarily, StashDB hosts information about relatively professional digital content of all orientations. This means all of the major digital networks are well covered. Amateur content hosted on a handful of platforms is also eligible for StashDB, but services like OnlyFans and Patreon are not. JAV is also allowed but is often subject to different guidelines. Most examples of animated content and full movies are not allowed at this time, but there are a few exceptions.
Some of the content not currently allowed on StashDB can be found on other publicly available Stash-Boxes. Unlike StashDB, these Stash-Boxes are not run by the Stash team but are still directly compatible with the Stash software. A full list of Stash-Boxes can be found here.
New Contributors
For anyone who wants to browse or pull data from StashDB, you will first need to create a StashDB account using an invite token. Instructions found here. New accounts will be limited to read-only access, but will still be able to submit fingerprints back to StashDB to help others find matches for their files.
In order to fix incorrect info or add missing data, your account will need to be granted edit access. More information can be found here with more detailed instructions in Discord pinned to the #stashdb-invites channel. Voting access comes later. Make sure to watch for comments/downvotes on your edits and messages on Discord/Matrix alerting you to any issues or possible violations of the guidelines.
At the discretion of an admin, a user’s edit access may be revoked at any time. This happens very rarely and is only done when absolutely necessary to maintain the integrity of both the database and the community. The most common reason for losing these privileges is a lack of communication. More information on our enforcement process can be found here.
Getting Started Pages
The following Getting Started sections are general advice and explanations for potentially confusing aspects in our database. Because they don’t represent explicit decisions concerning database management or curation, they do not require formal approval. The first topic named StashDB covers broader topics that aren’t exclusive to a single category. The rest are organized by each main heading across the top of StashDB. All of these can also be found on the left side of this webpage under FAQ / Getting Started.
Guideline Overview
Guideline sections are organized by each main object type: Performers, Scenes, Studios, and Tags. These parent pages are then split into the actions you can take with each object: Create, Edit, Merge, and Delete. These Edit pages are broken down further into each available field for that object, reflecting the order in which they appear on StashDB.
Parent pages serve as overviews of the entire category. Sometimes they will include one sentence summaries of each guideline section followed by links to more detailed explanations. All of these can also be found on the left side of this webpage.