Armories and the TRO's that go with in them are the main draw of Solaris 7.  No other site I've seen has anything like it.  Solaris 7 is something of the Deviantart of the battletech world.  A member is able to sign in and have their own "space" to show off their stuff.  And an armory could either be just a giant holding bay for all of a person's stuff with minimal fluff,  Or in some cases, a single armory can become a multilayered work of art in its own right, telling the story of group, be they pirates, a company or a star empire and the things they have made or kludged.

The other draw of being focused on the posting and showing off of custom designs is that it generates new content on its own.  Any other website is pretty much limited to what is already written down about battletech. (Battlecorps excepted....)  But IIRC the Battlemech count of the last version of S7 was over 20,000.  Admittedly a number of them were deleted from inactive accounts over the years, but you're still dealing with more content generated about battletech then all official sources combined. (At a rough estimate.)

From what I remember, the S7 forums were slowly dying off, or at least inactive.  The resident population was not that large, and we are a bunch of know-it-alls with no further questions.  Not a lot to talk about.   But we would still get new designs posted,  and that would spark conversations in the review section of the posting.

The real question is, to what purpose should the site be dedicated to?  An easy to access repository of knowledge definitely. Bring back the planetary database and art galleries.  Make available the links to the various mech design programs.  But remember that these things can be had elsewhere as well.   What can not be found is a database of custom designs, which can then be commented on, and rated.  Searched and filtered to see if anyone has had the same idea as yours.

And yes.  Armories definitely help organize all of that.

Other thoughts.
I can not create a new "Discussion."  this is probably not a bad thing right now since we seem to be attracting Bot "Members" as fast as real people, and who knows what spam we're avoiding.

Reviews and comments of posted designs.
Reviews should be allowed once,  But instead of a single 1 to 5 rating,  have 3 categories with 1 to 5 ratings.  I'm thinking things along the lines of, "How well written is the fluff, How effective the design is for its intended role, And something else.  Someone help out.  I suppose 2 separate ratings is enough but 3 would be better to my mind.

Comments on the other hand, there needs to be a way to respond to someone else's comments in a linear fashion, probably similar to facebook's reply ability.   It sometimes got ridiculous dealing with @Theogre @theogre2 @Ice Hellion @Chip @Chip2 @Chip3 @chip4 @ChipIamnottalkingtoyouanymore  and having to go back and forth between your own answer and their comments.