There are no rules for publishing ANN thread.
Rules are mostly for the next post, like not allowed to bump your thread less than 24 hours and not allowed to posting in a row.
What you can't post are referral links, which are against the rules:
4. No referral code (ref link) spam. [1]
Nope, it's allowed.
Anyone can create a thread and post their referral link, what people have to avoid is posting the referral links for multiple times which is called as spam.