I’ve run into this many, many times now. It’s not uncommon that what compels a new or lurking user to make a post is to do some form of show & tell. It could be:
Something they made
A problem they’re illustrating
Participating in an ongoing gag
I always feel like a new user has been given an unnecessarily cold greeting when they have to point out in their post that - as much as they would like to - they can’t paste a picture, because they’re not allowed yet.
So instead of disallowing image links altogether, couldn’t we just be a bit more cautious about it instead? I’d suggest putting images from TL0 users behind a “click-to-show” protection, kind of like this:
There are many options for such a layer:
Just a solid color overlay with a “play/show” button of sorts, similar to the above.
A spoiler tag
A heavily blurred out image
Number 3 would require more post-processing on Discourse’s side, but it’d look pretty cool though ^^