Well, the reason why there is no "preview" field in the template is two-fold. First, there is the problem that art of all ratings and content can be recced, but the community itself is intended to be completely "worksafe" so that would create a problem with for lots of art in that either the reccer would have to make the thumbnail so tiny that you can't see anything, or crop art. So the presence of images leads to potentially more moderation problems when people forget that any preview image needs to be made small and worksafe.
Which leads to the second problem that unless an artist hosts their art on a service with a built-in thumbnail embed (like dA), a reccer would need to take art, copy it (obviously to avoid hotlinking issues), and modify it to make a preview. Now most fans probably see this as fair use and akin to quoting a small excerpt from a story as long as the preview is small, but it might run into art control issues.
Also there is a certain risk that with the convenience of just showing the picture, the actual rec part is seen as more superfluous, because you can use the preview to tempt the click. I mean, I realize it is sometimes hard to say why one likes a piece of art the explanation of why it is recced, but I like the written rec part, even if it is just short, and wouldn't want to see it replaced by just showing the art.
Finally there is the practical problem that DW has no image hosting, so each reccer would need to have space to host images, and a little bit down the line you might have lots of ugly broken image links in the rec archive, as can be seen in any community when you go back a few years and people didn't maintain the preview images. I cringe every time.
So I'm not too thrilled with previews in this rec community. But if you think previews would make reccing much more attractive to you, I'd be willing to do a poll about this, briefly laying out the pro and cons of allowing them, and then see how the majority thinks about making previews optional part of the recs. (They'd never be mandatory, because personally I find cropping and resizing a horrible hassle even when posting my own art, so I would not want to bother for a rec.)
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Which leads to the second problem that unless an artist hosts their art on a service with a built-in thumbnail embed (like dA), a reccer would need to take art, copy it (obviously to avoid hotlinking issues), and modify it to make a preview. Now most fans probably see this as fair use and akin to quoting a small excerpt from a story as long as the preview is small, but it might run into art control issues.
Also there is a certain risk that with the convenience of just showing the picture, the actual rec part is seen as more superfluous, because you can use the preview to tempt the click. I mean, I realize it is sometimes hard to say why one likes a piece of art the explanation of why it is recced, but I like the written rec part, even if it is just short, and wouldn't want to see it replaced by just showing the art.
Finally there is the practical problem that DW has no image hosting, so each reccer would need to have space to host images, and a little bit down the line you might have lots of ugly broken image links in the rec archive, as can be seen in any community when you go back a few years and people didn't maintain the preview images. I cringe every time.
So I'm not too thrilled with previews in this rec community. But if you think previews would make reccing much more attractive to you, I'd be willing to do a poll about this, briefly laying out the pro and cons of allowing them, and then see how the majority thinks about making previews optional part of the recs. (They'd never be mandatory, because personally I find cropping and resizing a horrible hassle even when posting my own art, so I would not want to bother for a rec.)