I got used to tag the artists from Pixiv by using their Pixiv ID (And not their displaying name) since almost 4 years now, but sadly since recently it is not possible anymore, at least with the image URLs. They got changed to this template:

http://ix.pixiv.net/img-original/img/YYYY/MM/DD/xx/xx/xx/xxxxxxxx_px.jpg

So what should I do now ? Is there no other way to find their ID beside the image source ?

This is exactly what I've been talking about before.
We should always use the nicknames, not the IDs. The latter are often completely arbitrary, rarely used the artists anywhere else, and prone to change.

The IDs were in some way a better choice because they can't be changed unlike the displayed names. They also only contain letters and numbers, so no need to translate those pesky Japanese kanji too

There's a few alternatives:

- Most pixiv artists have a twitter account listed these days, we could use that whenever possible.

- We could use the Japanese nick and alias those to the translations. This is probably what most of the artists themselves would prefer; and since e621 gets a lot of users from Japan, this would make it easier for them too. On the other hand, it requires someone to actually translate those.

- And some boorus tag the artists with combo of nick and pixiv profile number: <nick>_(pixiv_<number>). Though that tends to lead to very long tags.

Genjar said:
There's a few alternatives:

- Most pixiv artists have a twitter account listed these days, we could use that whenever possible.

- We could use the Japanese nick and alias those to the translations. This is probably what most of the artists themselves would prefer; and since e621 gets a lot of users from Japan, this would make it easier for them too.

- And some boorus tag the artists with combo of nick and pixiv profile number: <nick>_(pixiv_<number>. Though that tends to lead to very long tags.

I have also seen just this "pixiv_12345" or "pixiv_id:12345" or even "pixiv_id_12345" etc format with their pixiv number, which might be the most universally easy to use from all language backgrounds. Though it's not very pretty, it has numerous benefits including being easy to find it on the page when you're uploading from pixiv, and it also makes it easy to reverse-search and find the artist's account on pixiv using that info in the tag. I know some other image boorus use this method and it does have some definite benefits in a world where not everyone can consistently read, transliterate, and/or search using katakana/hiragana characters. And even those who try sometimes butcher it unintentionally and it creates tagging confusion later on. I think we're better off if what we use is easy for people to use/locate/read because that way anyone can:

• read the artist tag,
• double-check that the artist was tagged correctly,
• find if there's an existing tag for that artist when uploading so that they don't duplicate and can use the appropriate tag,
• be able to tag the artist when someone uploads something that's sourced at pixiv but left out the artist tag because of the language barrier, and
• be able to generate a new tag if they are uploading the artist for the first time.

If we rely on transliterating the katakana and hiragana names and nicknames, then we severely reduce how many people can functionally use, double-check, find the existing tag for that artist, know what to tag it with when they find one untagged, etc. And e621 is too big to rely on only a few multi-lingual users to handle all of this and clean up everyone else's attempts, especially when there's a lot of images from pixiv. The reality is, unless someone can transliterate the katakana/hiragana themselves, then they have no way of even being able to tell if the artist in the source page and the transliterated artist name in the tag here are even saying the same thing. And using the transliterated name also doesn't allow people to easily search pixiv to find the artist's account if someone failed to link it.

I'm not a fan of picking a system that only a few who speak the language can functionally use. We get users from all different languages who have to deal with the whole site being only in english. I don't think it's a good idea to also require them to be able to coherently transliterate katakana and hiragana characters in order to tag an image from pixiv. I think if there's a more universally friendly way to tag pixiv artists that minimizes the language/character/alphabet barrier, then we would be better off using that. Otherwise consistency and accuracy will continue to suffer when it comes to tagging artists from pixiv.

furrypickle said:
I have also seen just this "pixiv_12345" or "pixiv_id:12345" or even "pixiv_id_12345" etc format with their pixiv number, which might be the most universally easy to use from all language backgrounds.

That seems problematic for two reason:

1) What about the artists who delete their pixiv account? If all we have to go on is the profile number, it becomes impossible to find them elsewhere on the net.

2) And what if pixiv decides to change their numbering system? That'd make all those artist tags unidentifiable at once. I can certainly see it happening: FurAffinity already did something similar at one point, which led to all FA sources becoming invalid. That was already bad enough, but if it had been artist tags instead of sources...? Seems too risky.

Also, some artists might not appreciate being referred to by the account numbers. Some that I've talked to didn't even like being tagged with their login name, and tagging them with serials seems like a step in wrong direction.

It might be easiest to just cut-and-paste the nicknames from pixiv, and use those. The artists would probably prefer that, but on the other hand, it'd make the tags hard to search for.

And as you pointed out, translations are also problematic because regular users have trouble connecting those to the actual nicks. So we end up with tag clutter and artwork spread over multiple tags. Machine translation can't be relied upon either. Meh. I'm not sure if there's an optimal solution for this.

I agree with User:15934 in that we should only use arbitrary numbers to identify others.

But seriously, we should use the name, then fill out the artist page to include the pixiv number, and take the number (maybe Pixiv_XXXX) and alias that to the artist's name.

This solves all problems, we have a place that we can check the number (and any other names), it doesn't look ridiculous in the tag list, you can still tag and search the artist by the number.

I suppose that'd work.
It would require a lot of new aliases (and someone to handle those), but other than that, I don't see any problems with it.

I just noticed two things. Only new pictures have source in img-original format. Old pictures still contains pixiv id in their source, so it can be retrieved.

Also I'm not sure whether it's correct for all artists but probably when you click "feed" tab on artist page then you are directed to url that looks like this http://www.pixiv.net/stacc/<pixiv_id>

So pixiv id of an artist is probably still available.

There's a thread about this on danbooru here

In the case where it's a new artist with no old url links though, I think we may have to rely on just the nickname or external username (twitter/website etc) as Genjar mentioned