The bulk update request #908 has been rejected.

Reason: This is my first time doing one of these so my apologies if I have done something wrong.

This artist (whom I will refer to as "gamu9842", as that is their main e621 account currently) has certainly been quite the enigma, and unlike anything I have ever seen over the three or so years I've spent lurking on e621. Over the past 13 or so months, he has posted his art from four seperate e621 accounts and no less than 25 Twitter accounts. Understandably, the artist has valid personal reasons for switching accounts and changing names so often, but unfortunately, the artist creates new e621 artists tags for every single account they create.

As of now they have at least twenty-nine different tags that refer to them specifically, which makes it an absolute nightmare to actually find all of their posts (as they have multiple accounts across e621 as well, even searching by user uploads will only get you so far). There may very well be even more tags of theirs that I simply haven't come across yet. In total, across all of their tags, they have close to 100 posts, but the most that any of them are actually applied to is 27 (carnivorous_owl).

The list I have created above is the product of several hours I have spent digging around and cross-referencing e621 for information regarding this artist and their illustrations, and viewing the tag history of all of their posts. Note that some of tags no longer have any posts tagged with them as the artist has removed them after deleting some of their accounts.

I chose the name "gamu9842" as that is the name they currently go by on e621 . They also appear to be currently active on another account, Purgatory_3028 , which may complicate things as regard to an appropriate name to use. Their other two accounts, which are no longer in use, are noivern_9595 , and dragon_dive99 . I would recommend that someone DMail the artist regarding this or their tagging behavior in general (I'm too much of a coward to do it myself, I'm sorry). No longer valid, see June 5th edit below

UPDATE MAY 27th: found another one of their tags (drg) on post #2745929 , this takes the total up to 30.
UPDATE JUNE 2nd: The artist is still making new tags on a fifth e621 account, there are 34 in total now, added the four new ones to the request
UPDATE JUNE 5th: bitWolfy has chosen to alias all of the artists existing tags to carnivorous_owl, see his post later in this thread for more details. I would like to thank him personally for his assistance in solving this conundrum and to those who upvoted this BUR for your support. May e621 live long and prosper.
UPDATE JUNE 16th: The artist is attempting to get himself on the DNP list as he appears to no longer wants his posts on here, so this BUR is being canceled.

Well, this is kind of nuts.
Is there any solid proof that all of these aliases belong to the same person?

I also have a couple of comments on the BUR itself:

First, the following tags are empty:

blackbird_1515
lucky_water_iris
phantom_clover_(artist)
3syokudangu_3
toro_jr3
rokurokubi_23

Specifically, blackbird_1515 and 3syokudangu_3 never had any posts to them. Not sure where those even came from.

Second, I don't know about aliasing ocean_dragon to an artist tag. It could be used for a name of a species; in fact, one of the posts tagged with it is being used for a species.

Finally, roro is a character tag. It should not be aliased to an artist tag.

bitwolfy said:
Well, this is kind of nuts.
Is there any solid proof that all of these aliases belong to the same person?

I also have a couple of comments on the BUR itself:

First, the following tags are empty:

blackbird_1515
lucky_water_iris
phantom_clover_(artist)
3syokudangu_3
toro_jr3
rokurokubi_23

Specifically, blackbird_1515 and 3syokudangu_3 never had any posts to them. Not sure where those even came from.

Second, I don't know about aliasing ocean_dragon to an artist tag. It could be used for a name of a species; in fact, one of the posts tagged with it is being used for a species.

Finally, roro is a character tag. It should not be aliased to an artist tag.

Sorry, blackbird_1515 and 3syokudangu_3 were spelling errors, it should be black_bird1515 and 3syokodangu_3 respectively. I will correct those now.

ocean_dragon was the name that artist used for post #2729258, short for Ocean_Dragon99, this appears to be an oversight on behalf of the artist. Same goes with roro (short for roro23). I will likely edit the posts themselves to correct this.

lucky_water_iris, phantom_clover_(artist), toro_jr3, and rokurokubi_23 were used on some of the artists posts at one point, but the artist had deleted or changed them after deleting their repsective twitter accounts.

Hope that clears up everything.

edit: Hopefully I've corrected all the problems now

Holy shit.

thuser85230558 said:
edit: Hopefully I've corrected all the problems now

You should also add 3syokudango (without the _3 at the end) to the BUR.

I'll send them a DMail, asking them to stop doing this.

votp said:
Holy shit.

+1 to this

least of all because why does an artist need 30 names

strikerman said:
+1 to this

least of all because why does an artist need 30 names

Like, I know there's a guy on FA through the banners that has fifty-something accounts for roleplaying, Ryugji or something, but Jesus, there's no reason for it here.

This guy must not be very good at remembering passwords.

This... is the weirdest but interesting BUR I have ever read.

I mean, I could upvote it, but at this point doesn't it seem more likely that the artist's next upload will be tagged with a 30th tag?

wat8548 said:
I mean, I could upvote it, but at this point doesn't it seem more likely that the artist's next upload will be tagged with a 30th tag?

The artist uploaded again twice this morning on two of the tags that was already on the BUR, so far they don't seem to be aware of this BUR's existence as of yet. But yeah, unless we do something about this they may very well wind up creating more tags that would require even more alias requests, and we'd just end up in a proverbial vicious cycle. I'm not even 100% certain myself if anything will even come out of this to be honest, but at least it's worth a shot.

thuser85230558 said:
The artist uploaded again twice this morning on two of the tags that was already on the BUR, so far they don't seem to be aware of this BUR's existence as of yet.

They should be aware of it – I told them.
I also told them to stop making new artist tags, and to let me know which tag they would prefer to use from now on. So far, they have not responded.

If they decide to ignore me and keep making new accounts and tags, I will escalate this situation to an admin.

bitwolfy said:
They should be aware of it – I told them.
I also told them to stop making new artist tags, and to let me know which tag they would prefer to use from now on. So far, they have not responded.

If they decide to ignore me and keep making new accounts and tags, I will escalate this situation to an admin.

Keep in mind that English is not their native language (they are Japanese) so that might be something you need to consider.

bitwolfy said:
They should be aware of it – I told them.
I also told them to stop making new artist tags, and to let me know which tag they would prefer to use from now on. So far, they have not responded.

If they decide to ignore me and keep making new accounts and tags, I will escalate this situation to an admin.

Is it possible (might consider tossing this as an idea to Kira if not, presently) to temporarily lock uploading ability and display a message to a user stating as much, without full-on banning? Custom messages would be advisable. "Hey, you're kinda doing something we're rather you not do and tried to get in touch, but have not been able to get in contact. Please check your messages if you want to continue uploading, [Link]Here[/Link]. You're not in trouble, but will not be able to continue uploading until this issue is resolved."

Possible new e621 account? It was only created a few days ago, only has one post #2762340 so far (uploaded about 70 minutes ago), and said post initially had very few tags (consistant with posts from the other account). Art style seems very similar too. The account name is ramune147 . The uploader did not apply any artist tag this time but another user did when editing the post mentioned above, names are "mantis_king" and "elw1j1".

While I am reasonably certain this is the same individual I'm not 100% certain so I'm not going to add these tags to the BUR just yet, but I would appreciate others' input on this.

ramune147 has posted a few more times, I'm 100% certain this is the same individual now, so I'm going to add the new tags to the BUR.

bitwolfy said:
They should be aware of it – I told them.
I also told them to stop making new artist tags, and to let me know which tag they would prefer to use from now on. So far, they have not responded.

If they decide to ignore me and keep making new accounts and tags, I will escalate this situation to an admin.

Unfortunately the user is still creating more artist tags, he's created another one (guren_flower) yesterday, which is now labeled as a character tag for some reason (but is, as far as I know, the name of the artist and not any of the characters in his posts), and another three were created by another user editing their posts in the last 48 hours. There's a new Twitter account to go along with it too. At this rate there could very well be another five or six tags on this BUR by the end of the month if this continues at the rate it's going.

thuser85230558 said:
ramune147 has posted a few more times, I'm 100% certain this is the same individual now, so I'm going to add the new tags to the BUR.

Unfortunately the user is still creating more artist tags, he's created another one (guren_flower) yesterday, which is now labeled as a character tag for some reason (but is, as far as I know, the name of the artist and not any of the characters in his posts), and another three were created by another user editing their posts in the last 48 hours. There's a new Twitter account to go along with it too. At this rate there could very well be another five or six tags on this BUR by the end of the month if this continues at the rate it's going.

someone please send him a link to a password manager

strikerman said:
someone please send him a link to a password manager

He is doing it on purpose, not because he's forgetting passwords.
https://e621.net/posts/2727731#comment-5706446

jesus chrystler jeep grand cherokee. o_o

Don’t really care whatever issues or self-created pity party this artist has, he’s a nuisance and creating problems. Permaban him and all his alts. Problem solved.

Maybe they don't want to be associated with some of their art, so they create a bunch of "anonymous" accounts? Or alternatively, since they seem to take art requests on one of their Twitters, maybe they want it to be difficult to find/contact them to reduce the number of art requests they get??? Or maybe they find it stressful to have too many followers on a single Twitter account??? It's so weird that it's hard to say.

crocogator said:
Maybe they don't want to be associated with some of their art, so they create a bunch of "anonymous" accounts? Or alternatively, since they seem to take art requests on one of their Twitters, maybe they want it to be difficult to find/contact them to reduce the number of art requests they get??? Or maybe they find it stressful to have too many followers on a single Twitter account??? It's so weird that it's hard to say.

we literally have an anonymous_artist tag

crocogator said:
Maybe they don't want to be associated with some of their art, so they create a bunch of "anonymous" accounts? Or alternatively, since they seem to take art requests on one of their Twitters, maybe they want it to be difficult to find/contact them to reduce the number of art requests they get??? Or maybe they find it stressful to have too many followers on a single Twitter account??? It's so weird that it's hard to say.

I follow one of his active accounts on Twitter and yesterday he posted some of their prior works from several of his previous accounts on that active account labelled as "previous works" (or something like that), so I somehow doubt that they don't want to be associated with their art. In the same post that bitWolfy linked above the artist said that he had "made a big mistake a long time ago" and that he got angry at people who were kind to him, but I can't really say that that's a justifiable reason for making several dozen different accounts and artist tags in a relatively short amount of time. The true reason for the artist behaving like this may forever remain a mystery at this point.

I'd argue they may possibly be doing it for some sort of attention, likely to foster some sort of personal style of social interaction or something. But of course, that's just speculation on my part.

clawstripe said:
I'd argue they may possibly be doing it for some sort of attention, likely to foster some sort of personal style of social interaction or something. But of course, that's just speculation on my part.

The artist has admitted to having multiple twitter accounts on one of their Twitters now, so I think we can safely rule out not wanting to be associated with some of their art as a reason for this. They don't seem to be doing this with malicious intent but their silence regarding this has been nothing short of confusing for me and many others involved.

https://i.imgur.com/ximHJIX.png

... Can I change my vote in favour of "nuke it all and ban them for this dumb shit"? This is kinda beyond the point where anyone on this site should be wasting time on this lunacy.

votp said:
... Can I change my vote in favour of "nuke it all and ban them for this dumb shit"? This is kinda beyond the point where anyone on this site should be wasting time on this lunacy.

Ban the account but not the art, posters can take care of keeping it to a single set of names.

furrin_gok said:
Ban the account

account(s)

Does e6 do IP bans?

strikerman said:
account(s)

Does e6 do IP bans?

Yes.

This artist actually has more esix accounts than THUser85230558 found. All of them do seem to be ignoring my messages, though.
I escalated the issue to the admins, but there has not been a definitive answer as to what to do about them yet.

Edit: I am going to make an executive decision, and put all of this artist's posts under the carnivorous_owl tag. That seems to be the most used tag (and the best sounding one, in my opinion).
Any further posts by this artist should use that tag.

@THUser85230558 Here is an updated version of the BUR.

alias 3syokudango -> carnivorous_owl
alias 3syokudango_3 -> carnivorous_owl
alias bean_sprouts_man -> carnivorous_owl
alias black_bird1515 -> carnivorous_owl
alias chocolate_cream_96 -> carnivorous_owl
alias cream_puff_b -> carnivorous_owl
alias drg -> carnivorous_owl
alias elw1j1 -> carnivorous_owl
alias flowerguren -> carnivorous_owl
alias garionm_dex -> carnivorous_owl
alias guren_flower -> carnivorous_owl
alias gurunix -> carnivorous_owl
alias harumaki99 -> carnivorous_owl
alias horse_rice -> carnivorous_owl
alias jewelry_bom -> carnivorous_owl
alias laplace_91 -> carnivorous_owl
alias lucky_water_iris -> carnivorous_owl
alias mantis_king -> carnivorous_owl
alias meteo -> carnivorous_owl
alias mukudori -> carnivorous_owl
alias oboroya -> carnivorous_owl
alias ocean_dragon99 -> carnivorous_owl
alias phantom_clover7 -> carnivorous_owl
alias phantom_clover_(artist) -> carnivorous_owl
alias poker_gash -> carnivorous_owl
alias pyson_32 -> carnivorous_owl
alias raiden_58 -> carnivorous_owl
alias rainbow_fang_(artist) -> carnivorous_owl
alias rakkyo258 -> carnivorous_owl
alias rokomoko -> carnivorous_owl
alias rokurokubi_23 -> carnivorous_owl
alias roro23 -> carnivorous_owl
alias tapioka8 -> carnivorous_owl
alias weak_star3 -> carnivorous_owl
alias wooorf -> carnivorous_owl

I went through every post on all of their accounts. This should really be all of them.
I've also made artist pages, linking everything back to carnivorous_owl.

The user isn't really doing anything malicious – no vote manipulation, no ban evasion, nothing.
So, for the time being, nothing gets done about it, I guess.

The updated tag script was made using my BUR creator from the following list:

I have also removed the following tags:
clover_(artist) - it was also used by clovercloves in the past. I'd rather keep these two artists separate.
gt - it was also being used by gt_(pixiv), a different artist. I have separated the two, but the name is too short and generic for the alias, in my opinion.

bitwolfy said:
@THUser85230558 Here is an updated version of the BUR.

I went through every post on all of their accounts. This should really be all of them.
I've also made artist pages, linking everything back to carnivorous_owl.

The user isn't really doing anything malicious – no vote manipulation, no ban evasion, nothing.
So, for the time being, nothing gets done about it, I guess.

I have changed the BUR to what you have suggested (although I'm not sure if the BUR is even going to be necessary at this point anymore). Thank you very much for your help! It was really appreciated. Unfortunately this won't stop the artist from creating new artist tags in the future, but I suppose this solution will work out for the time being.

thuser85230558 said:
I have changed the BUR to what you have suggested (although I'm not sure if the BUR is even going to be necessary at this point anymore). Thank you very much for your help! It was really appreciated. Unfortunately this won't stop the artist from creating new artist tags in the future, but I suppose this solution will work out for the time being.

Thanks.

I am not the biggest fan of just aliasing 40 tags to one artist. Whether or not it's even necessary is... hard to say. It's purely for the sake of searchability at this point.

I would be a lot happier if they just stopped making new accounts and artist tags.
But, since they have not done anything rule-breaking, and have not responded to any of my messages, here we are anyways.

Keep an eye out for their new accounts / tags, I guess.

This is a situation where "well, there's no rule against it" should probably be... reason to make a rule about it. I never thought there would need to be a rule about "don't make fifty billion accounts and tags for yourself", given it should be common sense, but... well, I guess common sense isn't.

bitwolfy said:
Thanks.

I am not the biggest fan of just aliasing 40 tags to one artist. Whether or not it's even necessary is... hard to say. It's purely for the sake of searchability at this point.

I would be a lot happier if they just stopped making new accounts and artist tags.
But, since they have not done anything rule-breaking, and have not responded to any of my messages, here we are anyways.

Keep an eye out for their new accounts / tags, I guess.

e621:rules said:
Tagging Abuse / Tagging Vandalism
Suggested Suspension Length: 3 days
This category includes:

• Failure to cite a minimum of 4 tags to an uploaded post
• Adding a tag to a post that is not either clearly visible, or reasonably assumed
• Removing a valid tag, either as part of a dispute/argument, or to place one that is not correct
• Failure to properly set the rating of your upload (https://e621.net/help/ratings)
• Knowingly adding or editing a post source to an incorrect link
• Adding invalid/disruptive tags, or any tags that could be considered as defamatory or spam
• Using Unicode in tags, with the exception of foreign artist/character names

• Adding invalid/disruptive tags, or any tags that could be considered as defamatory or spam

I'd say that adding completely different artist tags could be considered spam.

Well, the artist appears to have noticed, and they certainly don't seem to be too happy about this.
https://imgur.com/a/qO19mR3

If anyone here follows one of the artist's accounts on Twitter could they please try to reason with the artist? They don't seem to be reachable on e621 and I'd rather not do it myself for the sake of protecting my identity.

They said that they won't be posting on e621 anymore, unfortunately...
https://i.imgur.com/HTy1TBO.png

crocogator said:
They said that they won't be posting on e621 anymore, unfortunately...
https://i.imgur.com/HTy1TBO.png

Huh, well that's very unfortunate. I was kinda expecting this would be the end result to be honest, but it's always a shame to lose an artist from the website, so I suppose we will probably have to start posting their art on his behalf (unless they object to it for whatever reason).

thuser85230558 said:
Well, the artist appears to have noticed, and they certainly don't seem to be too happy about this.
https://imgur.com/a/qO19mR3

There is a certain logic in hiding in plain sight by posting their stuff amongst all the other stuff posted on a site designed to display stuff so people can find it. However, to do so in a manner guaranteed to be noticed by someone defeats the purpose of this strategy. If you're going to hide your uploading in plain sight, you need to blend in with all the other posts, not stand out.

clawstripe said:
There is a certain logic in hiding in plain sight by posting their stuff amongst all the other stuff posted on a site designed to display stuff so people can find it. However, to do so in a manner guaranteed to be noticed by someone defeats the purpose of this strategy. If you're going to hide your uploading in plain sight, you need to blend in with all the other posts, not stand out.

I absolutely agree. While I have very little experience with pixiv, it seems to me that the artist was treating e621 more like pixiv to that end, and was not entirely aware of the differing ethos between both sites. e621 is less focused on the artists themselves than pixiv, putting greater emphasis on the posts instead, and I guess the artist didn't really seem to fully understand that.

I think the question that remains regarding this artist is this; why was it so important to the artist that he scattered his posts across many, many artist tags, and why does he quit e621 only once his tagging abuse is undone? The only reasonable explanation I can really come with at this stage was that the artist was being harassed/stalked/persecuted by a third party, which I guess would make sense. He has implied that this was the case on his comments on post #2727731 after all. For all I know, he may return to e621 once again under yet another alias, but at this point only time can really tell. For now though, this situation has been resolved. Not necessarily in the ideal manner in my opinion, but resolved nonetheless.

Well, it appears that while we have won the battle, we have lost the war.

From the artist's Twitter this was a direct result of my attempts to continue posting on behalf of the artist. So I guess all of this was for nothing. I am very disappointed.

thuser85230558 said:
Well, it appears that while we have won the battle, we have lost the war.

From the artist's Twitter this was a direct result of my attempts to continue posting on behalf of the artist. So I guess all of this was for nothing. I am very disappointed.

Well, that sucks. I commend your hard work for this, and I wish the artist a beautiful life.

monsterbomb10010 said:
Well, that sucks. I commend your hard work for this, and I wish the artist a beautiful life.

His Twitter account is now deleted lmfao, so I guess that's not happening anymore.

Not like it matters anymore, I'm no longer interested in putting up with this belligerent individual anymore anyway, if he is going to treat himself, his followers, and e621 like this. I'm canceling this BUR.

The bulk update request #908 (forum #309998) has been rejected by @THUser85230558.

thuser85230558 said:
His Twitter account is now deleted lmfao, so I guess that's not happening anymore.

Not like it matters anymore, I'm no longer interested in putting up with this belligerent individual anymore anyway, if he is going to treat himself, his followers, and e621 like this. I'm canceling this BUR.

That's not very nice. These should still be aliased together so that users checking any tag can figure out if it's DNP.

The bulk update request #992 has been rejected.

Reason: Even a DNP artist should still be aliased to itself.

EDIT: The bulk update request #992 (forum #311550) has been rejected by @furrypickle.

furrin_gok said:
That's not very nice. These should still be aliased together so that users checking any tag can figure out if it's DNP.

I don't disagree, but will it matter when the artist creates another 5 usernames?

Well this is bizarre, the takedown is now resolved but the artist isn't on the DNP list, and only the posts that I have uploaded are now deleted. So I guess I shouldn't have canceled this BUR after all.

strikerman said:
I don't disagree, but will it matter when the artist creates another 5 usernames?

Something tells me that this artist is gone for good this time around, but we may never know.

azero said:
This guy must not be very good at remembering passwords.

I guess we found the reason why there are so many alts

The bulk update request #992 (forum #311550) has been rejected by @furrypickle.

Rejected for these reasons:
1, all of these tags (with one exception) are now empty, largely due to takedowns
2, the one tag that has anything in it, is one of the more ambiguously named ones wooorf which could get mistaken for a sound effect at any point and having it alias pointlessly would make that harder to spot or fix.
3, there are downsides to aliasing this many names into one direction, because the chances of a later overlap with someone/something else causing a mess... goes up with each one. Which does not seem at all worth it when all of them are deactivated and emptied by that artist. So it serves no purpose at this point.
4, it is more than clear that this artist does. not. want. their different names to be aliased together. We do allow artists to decide if they want to keep more than one pseudonym separated for any reason. Most commonly if one is strictly sfw vs nsfw. OR if one is a professional name for mainstream/real-life stuff vs a more private fandom name for less mainstream/real-life stuff. Usually if accounts can be linked, because they have made the links between them public, then they are fine to have them officially linked here. But on rare occasions an artist has requested two known accounts be kept separate and we have allowed that. I don't see why this would be any different.

I get how it's incredibly inefficient and unhelpful for any fan who tries to follow that artist. And this is a very unusual and extreme case. And people getting invested into this did not help to keep any of this objective in any way.

But in a nutshell: They did not want them to be linked. Someone forced it. They left and took everything with them.

I think there's a lot to be learned from this, but I don't think "alias them all anyway!" is the right call here. However, even if someone disagreed and wished to enforce an encyclopedic linking of all these empty tags just on sheer principle, consider this: by now they have no doubt made others and will continue to make others. Trying to link them all would be a Sisyphean task, without the artist's cooperation. I don't think that's worth it, on multiple levels. This thread exists now with the information, and I think that's enough for anyone who might be searching for some answers. But I don't see much point in pursuing this any further. So I have rejected the last BUR.