Topic: [Feature] Have artist linking do stuff

Posted under General

More of a brainstorming forum than giving an actual idea.

I'd like to get accounts that are linked to an artist tag to actually do more stuff than just have their artist page link to their account.

An idea I've been kicking around for a while that only came up in staff chats once or twice has been that it could give them a customizable search result page where when you search for artist12345 without other tags you a little artist page for artist12345 at the top of the search results. Give them a little bio area, prices, links for accounts, whatever they want to have there.

This is just my idea, I'd really like to know what others think or any additional ideas people have.

Something like this would be nice, as long as it's not too intrusive on the search. I often see artists who get hundreds of faves on e621 only get single-digit faves at the source, and very low numbers of watchers - so anything to help out the artists would be great.

A little unrelated, but for the same reason, I'd also like to see the source links moved into a more prominent place so maybe people click them more often.

If you're dead set on never showing uploaders publicly again, the least you could do is add some kind of public indication on a post's page that it was uploaded by an account linked to one of its artist tags. Distinguishing OC from reuploads was the main purpose of that field, and it drastically changes the context of a post in most cases.

Honestly, you could have it appear whenever only one non-negated artist tag with no wildcards in it appears in the search, even if there are a bunch of other tags.

Information should be pulled out of the artist's page in the database and reformatted horizontally.

To keep it unobtrusive, you could display it as a banner across the top using a [section]:

Artist information for ARTIST

Bio text

URLs • socials

You could enable the banner only on the first page of search results.

If the search consists of only a single artist tag like you said, expand it by default:

Artist information for kacey

Bio text

FurAffinityDeviantArtVCLOtonashi

Copy and paste the notes, have the URLs all on one line joined by a U+2022 bullet character or whatever.

Right off the bat I see potential problems. kacey has redundant URLs in the Notes section which is where a brief bio ought to be.

You could add a flag on the artist pages that enables or disables the feature, disabled for everyone by default, so you can make the info look nice first.

A similar thing I made is this, which hijacks a search and adds calendar selectors and back/forward buttons if the right date metatags are detected:

https://e621.net/forum_topics/24996

Updated

I might edit this later if I think of anything else, and I apologize if anything here isn't feasible, coding-wise, (and I'm also exceedingly tired, apologies for that, too), but here's just a couple of small thoughts:

1) Have a button like the "comments on my posts" link, but specifically for the artist tag instead of uploader ID. That way it doesn't matter who uploads the pictures, the artist could still quickly and easily search for new comments. Unless there's a way that's just as easy that I'm unaware of, but it'd still be nice to have it as just a quick link/button from the account page.

2) (From the other thread)

versperus said:
Artists with linked accounts get a unique name color [...]

I'm not entirely sure how this would interact with other account levels on the site, though. Would an artist color overwrite former staff / janitor / admin colors, or vice versa? Would artist be considered its own "level", or could an account be simultaneously marked as an artist and privileged, etc.? Should the color maybe stay the same, and the account level text change instead, like privileged? Personally, I wouldn't mind some visual indicator if it was possible to opt in/out of, but I'm not sure how it should, or could, be handled.

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Barring those two things, I don't see anything wrong with making it clear when the artist is the uploader. And having customized search info sounds neat, but as others have mentioned, as long as it stays unobtrusive to the actual search. Otherwise it'd likely cause more frustration than it's worth. Having it collapsible (and collapsed by default) sounds nice, though.

vulkalu said:
1) Have a button like the "comments on my posts" link, but specifically for the artist tag instead of uploader ID. That way it doesn't matter who uploads the pictures, the artist could still quickly and easily search for new comments. Unless there's a way that's just as easy that I'm unaware of, but it'd still be nice to have it as just a quick link/button from the account page.

This one's actually already possible, you can search post comments by tags: https://e621.net/comments?commit=Search&group_by=comment&search%5Border%5D=id_desc&search%5Bpost_tags_match%5D=tag

It might be worth putting it on the artist page whether the account is linked or not, many artists might still be interested to see this even without creating an account.

faucet said:
This one's actually already possible, you can search post comments by tags: https://e621.net/comments?commit=Search&group_by=comment&search%5Border%5D=id_desc&search%5Bpost_tags_match%5D=tag

It might be worth putting it on the artist page whether the account is linked or not, many artists might still be interested to see this even without creating an account.

Ah, I've never used the comment search before, thank you for that. But, yes, having a quick link to it specified for the artist would be nice, regardless of how it's done. I was just thinking about the account page since that's where a list of the other search buttons are. And I imagine some artists have longer/more... "annoying", I guess, names to type out, so just having something you can just click and be done with would be convenient. Maybe both options could work? One on the artist page that anyone can access, and one on the account page for linked accounts?

millcore said:
Give them a little bio area, prices, links for accounts, whatever they want to have there.

Doesn't the artist's wiki tag page serve that purpose? Users also have an About section on their profile pages. Both are easily reachable. Having multiple places to find the same info is often very annoying. Hard to keep them all in sync and you don't know which to visit for what.

mrox said:
Doesn't the artist's wiki tag page serve that purpose? Users also have an About section on their profile pages. Both are easily reachable. Having multiple places to find the same info is often very annoying. Hard to keep them all in sync and you don't know which to visit for what.

ehh... kind of, you get a box similar to what you type in here, and you can put the relative information in it, but it's not very intuitive and leaves a lot to be desired.

wat8548 said:
If you're dead set on never showing uploaders publicly again, the least you could do is add some kind of public indication on a post's page that it was uploaded by an account linked to one of its artist tags. Distinguishing OC from reuploads was the main purpose of that field, and it drastically changes the context of a post in most cases.

As of the newest version of the site, this now exists... but only for janitors for some reason.

wat8548 said:
As of the newest version of the site, this now exists... but only for janitors for some reason.

The changelog says that it's "Janitor+" which means "Janitors are the minimum permissions needed to do this thing"/"Janitors and up" basically. So not janitors "only".

And I think that's just to ease the uploaded images review/approval process, making it easier on the approval side, to tell when someone is uploading their own art.
So I'm not sure that includes anything the average user would see.

I also don't know how it works, to know if it has factored in the rare situations where someone sometimes uploads their own art and other times uploads for other artists as well. I know there were always a few who did that, so a cart blanche 'this account is an artist so all uploads are probably their own' might not always work smoothly. Especially if someone likes to commission other art for their characters sometimes, as well as being an artist in their own right. But I'm sure they'll work out any hitches, if it's needed.

More relevant to this thread:
There is/was a way for an admin to officially mark directly into someone's profile that they were x artist and to link their profile into the artist's wiki page as officially linked. But it was rarely used. I think I only did it a handful of times. As for what it did: I think it added an extra field to their profile where they could put commission info, etc. And added a link to their user profile onto their artist wiki as being that artist. But I'm not sure if it had any other features (or if it still works that way). But expanding or adding onto that would probably be a good thing.

In general, I would be in favor of adding some more features for artists and/or helping to make their info easier to see/find.
Also, asking artists what they themselves might want, could also provide some insights or directions from that perspective.

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One actual suggestion:
I know that people still ask for an easy way to follow or subscribe to an artist. So what if there was a specialty 'feed' type of page (similar to 'popular' or 'hot') only instead it would pull from a list of artist tags that they've subscribed to and display only the images uploaded with those artist tags on them. Essentially giving them a way to check if anything new has been uploaded with x artist tagged on it. But without having to manually check each artist tag every day. If it's doable, then it would benefit both artists and fans.

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