Little complex problem maybe only for me

I found that tag when I see meruka-kun posts.
Especially this post
post #197107

SauceNAO shows that there is source at pixiv, id is 25387491.
However, Artist delete that pixiv post. So, there is no source now.

From howto:source, It said do not use incorrect(=not working for now) source.

So, result is "there is no such as source" because pixiv link was "only link" for that

In this situation, Is "source_request" tag really needed?
Is it okay delete that tag?

onyxelkram said:
From howto:source, It said do not use incorrect(=not working for now) source.

I'm assuming this is your own conclusion and I'll just say it's false.

Incorrect source means URL where the content has never been or source which is third party mirror. Correct sources are URLs where the content have been posted by first party initially.

Source is always source, it doesn't matter if it doesn't exsist anymore. As long as it exsisted, that's the source we are looking for. Simply add the dead source to sources field and remove the source_request.

This is because if someone e.g. googles the URL where the artwork has been, search engines like google will crawl it from us and give user the content they are searching for. Alternatively there's archival website which requires URLs to work with. Regardless, dead sources are always sources and they keep being valuable, give them wherever possible and do not delete them for reason being 404.

Sometimes if the only place you can find the content is third party mirrors, content could originate from those and they can be path to find proper sources, so those can be also put into source field, but in these cases do not delete the source_request tag as that's simply step towards that goal. Sometimes the content uploaded is so old that the upload here did originate from that third party mirror.