what do we do when an artist goes by multiple names? It appears Jokerisdaking is also known as Roe Mesquita, and its not uncommon for an artist to have changed their name over time, as their style develops, or from host site to host site, especially deviant art

Sometimes we create aliases for them. For example, we have an alias that changes "netspike" to "tenzen" and one for "nitrotitan" to "kaminitro". Some artists have BOTH names in the tag, like "nyuu_(manekin-eko)" (this seems to be mainly a Danbooru thing).

If you want to request an alias, just a note: DO NOT use capital letters. They ruin everything.

follow up question: basically the same, but for characters

Batgirl, for example - we have both the generic identity, as well as several specific ones - I assume we use both if we know the character's name? or do we keep it simply, as in this example - as batgirl?

Good question. In this area, we've been largely inconsistent. Most major boorus tag both identities. We've done that for some characters, but then we also just call all the Sailor Moon characters by their Sailor identities (and someone tried to make aliases for their civilian personae, but messed it up by using capital letters). So... I don't know what to tell you, really. Just try and use the name most people will recognize the character by, I guess.

Lmao. I don't think anyone changes their current online alias as much as I do, though =P
XDDD

Sorry, I know, irrelevant post and all, but this thread got a chuckle outta me.

And I didn't know that caps didn't work in the aliases. Huh. Good to know.

Oh, they WORK, they just screw everything up. If you try to type a tag with a capital letter, it will automatically change it to a lowercase letter. BUT, if an alias has a capital letter, the capital letter will stay.

Here's an example using one of the broken aliases we currently have on request: let's say and alias is set up to change "rei_hino" to "Sailor_Mars". Entering "rei_hino" as a tag (regardless of capitalization) would result in "Sailor_Mars" (WITH the capitalization) being entered instead. Now the "Sailor_Mars" tag would still count towards the "sailor_mars" tag count, and searches ignore capitalization, so it would still show in a search. BUT, the booru recognizes capital letters as coming BEFORE the lowercase alphabet. So, it screws up the tag order by putting capitalized tags at the top (it also just plain looks bad).

To make matters worse, you can't go back and request the same alias without capitalization. The alias system recognizes it as an already-requested alias.

Geez. That does suck DX

hmmmm, I'm beginning to suspect that a lot of the pics I have labeled as being by dwwrider may not have been done by 'him' - too many disparate styles and signatures - was he an artist at all? A colorist? A collector? A commissioner? I have no idea

I made a comment about this before I saw your question, but no, he's not an artist, he's a writer. It says this in his dA profile, and he names the actual artist of each pic in the artist's comments.