I noticed this for Ouma_Tokiichi - the circle Shimoyakedou is aliased to this artist.

This is IMHO wrong for the purposes of Danbooru, since e.g. circles can rotate through artists over the years.

Instead, a circle name should be treated like a company qualifier, e.g. SNK.

Kikimaru said:
This is IMHO wrong for the purposes of Danbooru, since e.g. circles can rotate through artists over the years.

We can just break the aliases in those cases. Because really it's more common for circles to dissolve altogether than switch artists.

Kikimaru said:
Instead, a circle name should be treated like a company qualifier, e.g. SNK.

Come again?

ShadowbladeEdge said:

We can just break the aliases in those cases. Because really it's more common for circles to dissolve altogether than switch artists.

Come again?

There are also circles with multiple artists, so again I'd rather we break the aliases altogether.

>treating circle name like company qualifier

e.g. a doujin cover has ARTIST and CIRCLE as separate tags (sorry, poor wording).

Only single-artist circles are aliased to their artist. We don't need two artist tags for these cases.

If you find any multiple-artist circle that got aliased to one member, just request a removal.

Kikimaru said:

e.g. a doujin cover has ARTIST and CIRCLE as separate tags (sorry, poor wording).

Circle tags were known before many artist names, so I would guess that they have been aliased for convenience (easy search) and so that it doesn't break tag subscriptions. I believe that in most cases, circle : artist is a 1:1 relationship, so that makes sense.

You use SNK as an example, but it was decided many years ago that company tags such as SNK and capcom should not be used for single-game images. Instead, you should use them for crossovers with company_connection.

Moreover, SNK is a copyright tag. Do you suggest ARTIST and CIRCLE to be both artist tags? (of course, having an unrelated copyright tag would be bad)
The only circle I know of that has 2 artist tags on each post, 1 for the artist and 1 for the circle, is dakemakura-koubou. I don't know why. If we added qualifiers to the other 4 artists in the circle, I could search for *(dakemakura) to find all of them. EDIT: I guess this just exists because "find artist" doesn't handle multiple artists uploading from the same source very well.

With arttags:2.., I expect collaborations, colored images or derivative_works. If that isn't the case, I start wondering whether there's a tag missing or a wrong artist was added.
arttags:2.. -collaboration -colored -derivative_work

Separating artists and companies/doujin circles is not necessarily a bad idea, but if we are going to do it then we should do it properly. Just making them into a copyright or artist tags is not right and will bring more confusion than convenience.
By "properly" I mean creating new tag category/type that would also have its distinct color, like it's done at yande.re.

Whether this is worth the effort is another question, though.
One advantage I can think of is that we already have several company tags that are currently marked as copyrights, so this would allow to properly distinguish them.

Sal.N said:

Only single-artist circles are aliased to their artist. We don't need two artist tags for these cases.

If you find any multiple-artist circle that got aliased to one member, just request a removal.

Just chiming in late to say, yes, the above is correct and is how these should be requested.