Posted under General
I'm not satisfied with the way artist aliases currently work. When you add a new alias to an artist, that aliased artist gets silently updated. I'm also not sure if the conflating artists with artist aliases is the best idea. Does anyone who uses the whole artist UI heavily have any suggestions for improvement?
Updated by EB
Denormalize artist aliases into a single field or store them in a separate table. Either way, aliases should not be stored as full artist entries, as they are now. Aside from downsides already mentioned, conflating aliases with artist entries allows people to break things in 'interesting' ways. I've seen cases where people have put URLs in the alias entry instead of in the main artist entry.
Whatever you do, I would also suggest not calling them aliases. It's confusing because artist aliases are completely different from tag aliases.
Hmm, I'd probably rather see the idea removed and just replaced with "Japanese name". Or at least have that as an additional field alongside alias. Noting kanji/kana spelling is about the only time I ever use the alias field, and that's going to get duplicated a lot.
I agree with evazion that, if we do keep some sort of artist alias, let's not call it an "alias". Maybe just "other names" or "also known by". The term alias means something too specific here on Danbooru.
The aliases are also used for romanized versions of legitimate aliases or pen-names. With regards to the kanji/kana versions of names, I used to always set those in the alias.
More recently though we have been running across of different artists using the same name, this is especially common with kana only names. With tags, we use (often somewhat arbitrary) qualifiers to ensure uniqueness, but this isn't really something appropriate for aliases. This is a issue we should also take a look at.
Maybe it would be useful if groups are searchable, to find which artists are members of a given group. One reason to keep separate entries for groups is that they may have different URLs than the artist's site, and that pics posted on the group's site should not automatically be identified as belonging to one artist, when using the "find artist" feature.
But even for searching members of a group, just listing the group(s) an artist belongs to in the artist entry is entirely sufficient, if that field becomes searchable.
For single-artist circles there is no point at all in making them a separate entry though.
albert said:
I'm inclined to deleting the whole group/member concept. It isn't used much and I believe the notes can provide the same information.
If/before you do that, maybe you should look at what imouto does? They have a separate "circle" tag type, surely they have some logic behind it to match.
(For the record: no, I'm not advocating making it a tag type. Just looking at their implementation, as surely they must be using it enough to warrant adding dedicated logic to handle it.)
I think circle is a bigger deal for moe.imouto because they're dealing much more often with scans of artbooks and such by where circles are better known and show up more often. That and the userbase is more interested in and thus more knowledgeable about such things. It's not that we can't use the idea here, just that we wouldn't very often.
As for the existing group/member concept, I don't think I've ever used it.
I have used groups were there are multiple artists in a circle, especially when it is not clear which artist has drawn a particular piece of art. A circle with a single member is not really any different to an alias.
doujinshi.mugimugi.org does it like this:
For authors
Name: Gotou Keiji
Jname: 後藤圭二
Alt Names: ゴトウケイジ
Member in: Gocky Club / ごっきー倶楽部
For circles
Name: Gocky Club
Jname: ごっきー倶楽部
Katakana: ゴッキークラブ
Member(s): Gotou Keiji / 後藤圭二
