What's danbooru's stance on artist real names?

I've been wondering about Danbooru's approach to artists who real names are known. For example, the artist satou shouji is at his real name instead of his pen name Inazuma. The opposite of this is taka tony who is at his pen name instead of his real one, Tanaka Takayuki, which is a tag but has 0 posts under it.

So basically, I want to know if Danbooru always uses the artist’s real name when it is known or if go by the name the artist is best known by. Thanks in advance.

Real names are preferred over pen names. As for T2's case, it seems jxh already aliased the pen name to the real name in forum #73878, not sure why the tag's still taka_tony.

Fred1515 said: Real names are preferred over pen names. As for T2's case, it seems jxh already aliased the pen name to the real name in forum #73878, not sure why the tag's still taka_tony.

The alias must not have taken. I don't get any sort of warning message when an alias request submitted as part of a batch fails, and since what I submit doesn't always get listed in the resulting table in the order you'd expect, it's pretty hard to catch that something didn't go. This one would have failed because tony_taka was already aliased to taka_tony, and I need to remove that before I can fix it.

Done now.

Sorry to bump an old topic, but this has been bugging me for a while now.

On the internet, a lot of people (including artists and ourselves) would rather be known by a nickname over our real names.
This is usually to provide some degree of anonymity (e.g. to prevent an employer from finding one's risque art with a Google search).
Othertimes, it could be because an artist just prefers their self-chosen name over their birth-given name.

As such, are we not doing harm to an artist's reputation by removing this option?

Well, if we can find it with minimal effort an employer could find it with a similar amount of effort.

Correct me if I'm wrong:

The Danbooru community is not extremely interested in finding out artists' real names. It's just that over the years, using real names (when available) has proven to be a good disambiguation tool, handier than pen_name_(circle_name) or the like.

I thought that we just went by the name the artist is most well-known as. If that's their real name we use their real name. If its a pen name then we'd use their pen name (unless the pen name is ambiguous or something). I haven't heard of a rule that we have to use the real name, even if most people don't associate that name with the artist since the artist usually uses a pen name.

Toks said:

I haven't heard of a rule that we have to use the real name, even if most people don't associate that name with the artist since the artist usually uses a pen name.

However, we do have a similar rule concerning fictional characters' full "real" names versus much more well-known shorter variants and nicknames. Has that rule spread as an unofficial practice into artist names?

There's no rule about character names, either. The recent reveral of Tekken's Lili is proof of that.

Should we start creating lists of artists to reverse, then?

Well, since this is again a topic , I think it isn't that bad to bump a two year old thread. And it's also recent.
Well, apparantly, there is no clear stance how to treat this, especially when recently the alias from ricegnet to his real name was rejected.
But there is a page where it is explicitely stated
This covers pixiv, but there is also a section about artist name and how to approach them. And it seems that it isn't reduced to pixiv only (would be pointless)
The relevant step was done by evazion, a bit less than 2 years. I.e. this conversation is this thread was over. Now I don't know much what was going on here over 2 years ago though and I don't know what evazion's place was here on Danbooru.

So..if I'm going with @Hillside_Moose's decision, this wiki page has to be changed in that part.

If the guy doesn't want his real name to be a tag, then we respect his wishes. Otherwise, we stick with the rule as it has been followed for the past few years.

According to Hillside Moose, there isn't really a rule in place, though.
forum #117802 first sentence.
And this change done by evazion seems to come out of the blue?

There was an initial push to use real names for character tags, but topic #10123 shown just how obscure some names can be, which is why we reversed course and decided to use "common name" instead of "real name."

Much like fictional people, artists ought to go by a "common name" as well. On top of instant recognition with the wider audience, there's also the issue of personal privacy that artists have to deal with when using real names. While some artists do go mainstream and start using their real names in works such as the Satou Shouji/INAZUMA example above, most stick with pen names for a reason.

Provence said:

But there is a page where it is explicitely stated
This covers pixiv, but there is also a section about artist name and how to approach them. And it seems that it isn't reduced to pixiv only (would be pointless)
The relevant step was done by evazion, a bit less than 2 years. I.e. this conversation is this thread was over. Now I don't know much what was going on here over 2 years ago though and I don't know what evazion's place was here on Danbooru.

IIRC, I was just trying to document what the best practices were for naming artists (or at least my impression of what they were at the time), since this site has historically been bad at setting clear policies and actually writing them down. If it's not correct then feel free to update the wiki page. My "place" used to be as a janitor and longtime contributor to the site but my recommendations on that page shouldn't be interpreted as setting official site policy or as having greater weight than anyone else's statements.

goes back to lurking for another two years...