I fully agree with
@Heat Sink. It is indeed inconvenient to have several different ways to denote the author of the image. If you take a look at my user profile, you’ll see a combinatorial explosion of various authorship tags linked to my socials, because “artist links” were not well designed for having several authorship tags referring to the same person. It’s also very annoying that different tags that refer to the same person have different followership, and thus if people are subscribed to
prompter:marestare, for example, they won’t see new posts that contain
editor:marestare or
artist:marestare without the
prompter:marestare tag. For this reason, I’ve been adding several variants of the authorship tags to my posts.
It does seem very logical to decouple the authorship from the “level of human effort” categories of tags. Even on derpibooru, I think it would make sense to separate these concerns. For edits of other works, there could be a tag “edit”, and if people want to clarify who did what in multi-authored posts, they can do that via the description.
As for the unified tag naming, I don’t like the term “director”. I know it comes from e6ai, but I don’t like their choice because this tag doesn’t look all that intuitive for an outside person. An outside person would indeed look for something called creator or author. I think both are fine, but I lean more towards author for no specific reason other than maybe that it’s shorter.
