MyBB Community Forums

From a comment I made to a friend that kind of is a good starting point for why I'm creating this space:

basically the legal self education community wants a voat that they're willing to pay to keep afloat.  They want to be able to follow every comment the "big names" in that community make, and they need a place to post documents that they can have comments under and download themselves.  The documents need to be fairly easy to find. Does MyBB allow me to create such a place?

Sounds to me you're looking for certain features out of the box.  MyBB is very flexible, but excellent CSS and PHP skills might be required to implement specific functionality.  Either yours, or with monetary investment.  Natively, don't think MyBB is anything like Reddit - which I understand Voat was. 

Couple of things in your requirements jump out.

1. In MyBB, you subscribe to threads - or topics.  Not follow people or accounts.
   
2. MyBB searching is keyword based.  So a document attached won't be searched per se.
   

Now, they're ways to get around these issues.  But keep in mind you won't get these by default - or necessarily systemically.

Actually, I think the forum might work for you.
If you want to see ALL the posts that a particular user has made - you can do it by looking at their profile and selecting either "Find all Posts" or "Find all Threads" and you will see every comment/post made by that user.  - sounds like what you want.
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