[beutelwolf]

Originally Posted by hos

and the day when you find his name, i guess you'll take advantage of this, rather than "m012".

I would, but it would take some time to get used to that. There are some models in my database for which I have found a name, but that is so new that I only associate their looks with their numeric name, so I have to keep a reference to the numeric id so that I can still find them when I recognise them.

and what ID do they chose when they merge/replace unknowns with a named ID card? still XNK?

When they merge it is still an XNK, obviously. But either way (merge or solve) the move is documented in the solved list, so that people using the XNK number for their own purposes can track what happened to it.

is any starter of the thousands of still unsolved requests worried if these few "unknown female 1234 @iafd" / "XNK 4321" fills the amount of unsolved threads or the mystery box?

What people worry about is their private business. From my POV more problematic than by what threshold criteria a request is eventually deemed solved is that (long-term) solves are tricky to track with the system we have. At some point unsolved requests are either deleted or mystery-boxed.

So, I can look when the boxes are updated which box entries interest me, and bookmark the posts. (I actually do this via a sneaky forum trick of having my own "social group" for this purpose only). So, if I find a solve for one of those, or if I just want to check its current status, I can use the bookmark. Problem is: when it is solved it just goes away. Unless the box entry had a thread id that survived the boxing I cannot subscribe to that mystery. As a consequence, the solve may completely pass me by, and when it has there is no way to find out what happened to the id other than to open a new id request - because there is (i) no persistent numeric id by which to refer to a mystery, and (ii) no solves list that keeps track of those that have been solved.

nevertheless, if "Lucy @Wankmaster" is such an insufficient ID, then it's rather the question if such a request should better stay unsolved as well, than to do it totally wrong by chosing "Unknown xxx @yyy" as a solved request just because we've saying "Lucy @Wankmaster" is a solve (which, to me, is still more of a solve than "unknown xxx @yyy")

It depends what it means to be "solved", and what names are useful for search. An XNK at egafd can be great id, because it may lead to a substantial list of films the model has been in - and finding more material is what it's really all about. But it can also be a poor id, because it may just confirm: yes, egafd also recognised her in the same movie you did (and not in any others), and they also do not know anything else about her.

Lucy@Wankmaster is in that respect actually quite similar. You may search for that, you may find precisely that entry with nothing else beside it - and that is then pretty much the same situation as an egafd unknown one-timer. If there is additional material then great, that is like an egafd-non-one-timer. The problem with Lucy@Wankmaster is that there may be 31 of them, if Wankmaster is a long-running mag. Egafd has incidentally the same problem with non-XNK ids: it lists 31 Lucy's, i.e. models listed under the forename Lucy only (plus 6 Lucie's, plus numerous models where the forename Lucy also has a surname going with it). But there is a crucial difference: egafd keeps an index with all names, differentiating them with a numeric addition when ambiguous. We do not have complete name indexes. We just have a search function, and if that produces 31 different Lucy@Wankmaster threads you have to resolve that ambiguity every single time afresh.