Why are the different names only linked in the artist database, but not in posts?
I added the alias 'milktank' to the artist Gunner-L because it's the name of his site and the one name people recognize most, as it is featured a lot more prominently on his site than his pen-name.
I've always assumed that artist aliases relate to each other in the same way the tags 'breasts' and 'oppai' do, i.e. you get the exact same results when you search for them (actually, now I just noticed that breasts produces slightly more results, but what counts is that the they overlap). But with artist aliases searching for 'milktank' yields nothing, only a link that forwards you to the same search.
So is this like that for a reason? The only one I can think of is that if direct alias linking were allowed, someone could just link tony_taka with gunner-l and mess it all up.
But this brings up another issue, namely: why are aliases artists entries in themselves? I don't know any artists who produce vastly different works under different aliases, so I don't think this serves that purpose, but I can't think of anything else either. Currently they all seem to be empty entries that link to real artist.
Updated by albert