@yaomtc
I think the distinction that you may not know about is that those aren’t associated links ~~they are “verified”. Someone on staff has confirmed that the URL is in the possession and control of the artist, and the art at that URL is the artist’s unique and copyrightable property.
If I have some way of verifying the URL is one that is owned and controlled by the copyright holder ~~ the original artist themselves - then I can add it as a part of a tags description if they don’t have a profile on the site, but I usually only do that after some interaction with the artist themselves so that I can confirm their identity. Otherwise, the “User Link” verification process is what we use to establish and manage that information, and the source URLs of the images themselves act as an unverified or “word of mouth” record of sources.
However, those URLs on the image’s themselves can’t always be trusted, because there are so many aggregation, art theft, or derivative social media sources that get used on uploads, and most artists recently have multiple sources for images, ranging from DA to Tumblr and Twitter, as well as Pixiv and Patreon artists. Some of which they may want associated with their name, and others that they’d prefer remain hidden, or that might not actually be them but are just someone masquerading as them.
So, we manage all of that through the User Link process, which becomes a record of all of those verified sources in the artist’s tags, however many they may have, and whether it is public information or confidential, so aliasing or editing the User Link automagically updates everything. For URLs that were added by hand as a part of the description, someone has to remember to go edit those by hand if something changes, and we have to add other notes to identify if it’s public or confidential, etc. so those description based URLs can end up as data rot, if someone doesn’t remember to update them.
That becomes a real problem if artist’s galleries are hacked, which seems to be happening more with Tumblr.
So, for stuff like this, it’s best to work with User Links when verifying and setting them up, which does require a profile on the site to tie the information to.
