Creating New Artist Entries Based on their Stacc Name vs their Profile Name

I do like to bring up something in regards to the creation of new artist entries. While not particularly a huge issue per se, it is a little bit of a pet peeve for me and probably a few others.

Particularly in the case of Pixiv, quite a lot of users use the stacc name by itself as the artist name on Danbooru. In some egregious cases, users would use the stacc name by itself when it is given as a random jumble of numbers or "user_abcd1234". In a few cases, users do this even when the artist's given name is already in Latin letters or can be easily translated (hiragana or katakana).

I won't force my opinion on others, but I think the stacc name by itself is generally not a viable first choice for an artist entry because:

• I think it's simply lazy.

• Most stacc names are too generic (particularly the ones that are rendered as random numbers or "user_abcd1234", as mentioned before), which tends to be far more "disconnected" from any names or aliases the artist is known as; this is particularly problematic, as it makes them extremely unsuitable in tag searches here on Danbooru. After all, howto:pixiv did say to make artist tags simple, readable, and memorizable, which these generic names aren't.

• The stacc link is now generally inaccessible in most cases, therefore the stacc name is much less known and more hidden to outsiders.

If adding the stacc name to an artist tag is required to render it more "unique", then it is very often best suited as a qualifier only.

• An exception to this is if the stacc name is an accurate translation of the artist’s nickname on their profile page. In this case, then the stacc name by itself can be considered suitable as an artist name.

When I create artist entries, I generally prefer to make the name (closely) based on their "primary" name that the artist themselves are generally identified with (particularly, the name on their profile page).

Example

Example

Anyway, I've given my opinion on what is considered a proper artist entry. If anyone has any thoughts they want to share, then feel free to do so.

I tried fixing this for a week & gave up.

There's 111 pages of artist names with user_* (either for main name, or subname), and 106 pages for *_(pixiv*).

I'm not going to fix 4340 artist entries.
Our user base is simply stupid & won't learn.

I do feel like the ability to auto-create artist entries with stacc should be repealed, at least as a default option. But then I don't know what to replace it with... a ham-fisted script that attempts to make a name based on their username might be better, though.

Just as important, it's a bit cumbersome to replace the updated artist tags if you do manage to correct them.

I myself am sort of fine with how the users have at least created artist entries. As bad as the names may look, at least all future uploads will now be collected under that artist tag. Conversely, going back and figuring out artists on non-tagged posts is a heck of a lot more difficult of a problem IMO, especially if the post is bad pixiv id and it doesn't show up on SauceNAO. I myself once considered going through all untagged Pixiv posts and auto assigning artist tags either based upon the STACC name or the Pixiv ID just so that the posts would all be collected under an artist tag, but then I thought that would maybe have earned me a ban... or something like that.

Something that would go a long way to reducing this and other problems would be if changing an artist's primary name was a lot easier, both for users and software-wise.

Maybe instead of tagging posts directly with the name, we internally tag it with the artistID (or some other immutable token), then do an Id/name lookup as needed. This way, renaming an artist doesn't have to retag every post by that artist; it doesn't even need to search for posts.

This would mean that every artist tag would need to have an artist entry, which is not currently the case.

First of all, we need to ask ourselves what the potential consequences of continuously making bad artist entries should be.
It's one thing to have standards. That's not the issue here. The procedure is very clear because when you upload with no artist tags you get a notice that there is an howto artist wiki and a forum where you can seek help.

The real problem is, much like with tagging: There is not really anyone that enforces these procedures of creating artists. Even if you get called out by a Builder and receive a negative feedback there's still nothing happening. As I said, that is also the case with tagging.