Is it OK to link to an image in a moderator nomination?

Question

Today, I posted my nomination for a community moderator. Beside writing the text, I spent some time creating an "election poster" for myself. But when I submitted my nomination post, I got the message that images are not allowed in nominations, as a spam-prevention measure.

I uploaded my poster to Imgur and inserted a plain link to it in my nomination post, clearly stating that it is an election poster. I don't know if this is considered bending the rules, or if it is OK. I don't even know if self-promotional pictures are considered spam in a nomination post, or if the rule is meant to fight other types of pictures. There is a nomination post on Gaming which contains an embedded self-promotional video, and nobody seems to have a problem with it, so I decided to include the link. Still, I wonder: is it OK to keep it? And if yes, what kind of image would be considered spam in a nomination post? Why was the rule created in the first place?

Answer 1

One of the main standing reasons we do not allow images is because of their tendency to have substantial size. Your poster, as an example, would artificially inflate the vertical size of your nomination by about 50%. It's not so much that the poster is bad, but having it take up too much room makes the process of scanning candidates difficult. It also means a whole lot more space between when someone starts reading your nomination, and when they finally learn whose nomination they're reading.

Some of the original reasons behind the implementation were also targeted at primarily memetic or joke imagery which was used extensively in a particular election (which one I can't recall, but I'd be willing to assume that it was on Stack Overflow). As that was occupying space and not having all that much real substance, it prompted a lot of complaints and resulted in the decision to forbid images from being directly shown.

Linking to images, as you have done in your nomination, is fine if the image is relevant. The main concern is to avoid too much space being taken up, and also to discourage putting extraneous imagery into a nomination for little more than to "spice it up".

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The Gaming nomination you speak of is actually only possible because that's a different mechanism - on Gaming, a link to youTube is automatically rendered as a preview image and allowed to be seen inline. As such, it ignores the image block because it isn't an image, but indeed a link.

We've been inclined to let it go by, both because it condenses a lot more information for the size it takes up (seeing as it's worth several images plus the voiceover), and even with it, the nomination as a whole still fits on a resolution that is 768 tall.