I fully respect the amount of time, money, energy and effort that goes into running a forum like this. But I don't think this premium account malarky is the way of going about it. Most other forums use advertising (Google Ads, Amazon links and other ideas) to support themselves without ever having to resort to charging their members directly for content, and certainly not for basic content.

* No adverts

Seriously, as long as they don't crop up mid-post (some forums do this, but none that I frequent regularly), I don't have a problem with adverts. They work well on just about every other message board in existence, especially SFF ones, and will generally cover hosting costs with little issue.

* A profile image (up to 300x300 pixels)
* A signature image (up to 50x50 pixels)
* Add posts to a list of favourites
* Ignore threads from users on the messageboards
* Ignore posts from users within a thread on the messageboard
* Up to 10 Messageboard Buddies
* The ability to use links inside of posts
* Custom timezones
* Custom date format

Sorry, but these are all basic functions that are expected of any modern message board in 2010. I don't expect to be charged for them any more than I expect there to be an entry fee to my local supermarket.

* A larger profile image (up to 400x600 pixels)
* A larger signature image (up to 200x80 pixels)

Large profile images take longer to load and aren't really necessary. There is a reason most forums limit them to 100x100 at best. Signature images are an invention spawned directly from Satan's Book of Lame and make browsing a forum an absolute pain in the backside, although thankfully you are limiting the size of them.

In addition, adding profile and signature images radically increases the amount of bandwidth the site is using, which appears to be self-defeating given you want to apparently keep bandwidth costs down.

* Helping to support the site just that little bit more

This is absolutely fine, and sticking up a PayPal box, employing advertising and Amazon links and so on are all great ideas. But asking people to pay so they can put links in their posts? Or just have a small avatar? You might as well charge them to have user names. Actually, somebody should patent that idea before Blizzard steal it.

If the running costs of the board are too high and you are losing money on it, there are various other avenues you could explore on the advertising front. Contact Jason at Dragonmount or Elio at Westeros or Mark and Robb at SFFWorld and find out how they manage it, or look into different advertising programmes. But I cannot see how your 'premium content' even remotely justifies the cost.