Introduction to Pixiv

There's a lot of awful art on pixiv, but I keep finding great pictures that aren't (weren't; they are now) on Danbooru yet. If you don't want to spend the time to look through there and just trust people to upload what's good, you're very welcome to do that. But it can be very worthwhile to check pixiv occasionally.

I frequent pixiv a lot because it's easier to have all the artists you're watching on your watch list on one site to see new drawings as they come out, than to check several website.

I rarely look through the latest added drawings, usually I just look at the weekly/monthly new stuff, the new drawings from the 100 odd people in my watch list, and lastly, look through the favourites of those people. It's a nice way to find good artists, and much more effective than trawling through the latest uploaded stuff.

surasshu said:
I registered right after reading this, and used Gmail with immediate response, so that should work. It did say something in red about "hotmail.com" which I simply assumed to be something like "if you're using hotmail, check your spam folder".

Anyway, thanks for the lenghty clear and helpful explanation!

I just tried to use a hotmail account, and i think the message is, hotmail.co.jp / hotmail.com cant be used, something along those lines.

I have been on piciv a while. As mentioned, it's a nice place to have a glimpse of anything new from watched artists. Added some nice stuff to my collection from that site. I can spend a long time looking for new artists or an artist I am re-discovering from some time ago. A good way to kill an otherwise boring day. =)

Pixiv ID has a special field in the artist DB in trunk now, for some reason. Why does Pixiv need special treatment? I don't like that at all; it's not even a very good site. Let them use URLs like everyone else.

petopeto said:
Pixiv ID has a special field in the artist DB in trunk now, for some reason. Why does Pixiv need special treatment? I don't like that at all; it's not even a very good site. Let them use URLs like everyone else.

What makes you think this is special treatment? In fact, this gives us more room to link the actual homepage and blog of the artist in question.

Perhaps a customized classification of the unique identifier would be better. You can classify those numbers as a Pixiv ID, for example. So if other sites like this exist, the administrator can just add another one.

Yeah, or whenever you add an URL, another URL entry appears. That way, even if an artist has fifty different pages, you can still put them all in his artist page.

Not that I think that's especially likely.

I thought that already was in the changelog for Danbooru 1.13.0

albert said:

• Normalized artist URLs. Artists can now have an arbitrary number of associated URLs.

surasshu said:
What makes you think this is special treatment? In fact, this gives us more room to link the actual homepage and blog of the artist in question.

Uh, what? There's an explicit "Pixiv ID" field in the artist page. That's special treatment.

You can specify multiple URLs now, too (you can see what it looks like on http://moe.imouto.org/artist/add, which is running it already), which seems to make this particularly unnecessary.

petopeto said:
Uh, what? There's an explicit "Pixiv ID" field in the artist page. That's special treatment.

I see what you mean, but I'm still not sure what's so special about that, other than that it's shorter than putting the whole pixiv URL in there. I took a look to see if it appeared on the profiles as something extra exciting, but it doesn't.

I don't suppose it's very important considering that multiple URL thing, though.

petopeto said:
Uh, what? There's an explicit "Pixiv ID" field in the artist page. That's special treatment.

And that is a problem why exactly? FC2 already gets it (and has been for a long time), I see no reason not to have other specially treated attributes and/or sites. Danbooru's not about cutting down the DB schema to some axiomatically irreducible set, but about describing the real-world artists accurately, and it so happens that Pixiv is very popular amongst Japanese artists.

FC2 doesn't have a dedicated field; it has two transparent lines of code.

Many of these are the same as the artist tag, anyway, and where they're not, there's the aliases list, too.

Still, why is that a problem? Your only argument so far is that special casing is bad because it treats some cases specially.

I suppose petopeto has a point. I could parse Pixiv ids based on the URL.

That however only works for Pixiv URLs, and many of the most prolific posters make it a point to use the artist's home page if possible, and not the Pixiv-posted pics. So whilst automating it would be of course handy, it's not a substitute.

Why not? Instead of filling in the "pixiv ID" field with the id, you fill one of the "url" fields with a pixiv url that contains the id.

Perhaps the best of both worlds would be to have no "pixiv ID" column in the schema, instead storing it as a url in the url table, but having urls matching that format mapped to a "pixiv ID" property and field on the Rails side of things.

LaC said:
Perhaps the best of both worlds would be to have no "pixiv ID" column in the schema, instead storing it as a url in the url table, but having urls matching that format mapped to a "pixiv ID" property and field on the Rails side of things.

This is what I ended up doing.

Pixiv prohibits direct links to its images, and will give "403 Forbidden" when you follow such a link.

One solution to this is to use a browser plugin that sends a fake "Referer" header, because that is all Pixiv checks (at the moment).

Another solution is to take the image ID from the link (last part of the URL before the file extension), and append it to this URL (which you can get from any image page by removing the image ID): http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=

For instance, the image URL http://img10.pixiv.net/img/codoyeo/602536.jpg would become http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=602536

This way has the advantage that you can not only see the pic but have immediate access to the author, tags and comments associated with the image. It is quite straightforward to write a javascript to do this automatically as well.

Whatever the solution is, the http://img10.pixiv.net/img/codoyeo/602536.jpg URLs are a necessity for mass editing. Please leave them as is, that goes for everybody uploading from pixiv.

So a it would be best to have a system whereby if you click on pixiv URL it recognizes it as such and then converts it to: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=602536

I can't tell if that's what you mean with the Javascript thing, insomnia is making my brain slow. D: I'm just sayin', the source field with the directlink in it has a function that would be lost if it was changed.