The practice of only voting in favour of your friends should not be acceptable

1. Any user of this website is (and should be) entitled to not vote on a debate without having to give a single justification for it. 2. Banning being the best, this is the second best deterrent of troll-type members who aggravate the community as a whole from doing so. 3. Unless private PMs occurred and privacy rights of users are violated for no reason other than suspicion of vote conspiring, there is simply no morally acceptable way to prove this is occurring. I will now expand on these points: Since anyone can choose not to vote on a debate for no reason whatsoever without any punishment, the intentional refraining of voting on a friend's debate where the user believes they have lost is absolutely acceptable and should be if we don't want to force users to vote on debates. In fact, this is far more preferable than someone who would go so low as to look for the slightest scrap of RFD to write in order to justify voting for their friend when they believed they voted wrong. Nonetheless, even if they voted against their belief rather than refraining from voting, that is still fine as long as the RFD meets the requirements, to suggest differently would be to encourage the very favoritism that the resolution seeks to avoid but rather it would be reversed favoritism in that anyone suspected of voting for their friends owuld have to meet higher requirements for their RFd which is simply unfair and would be open to extreme corruption by the vote mods. The second point I raise is that other than banning, this is the next best deterrent of nuisances to the site. The reason is that if they consistently annoy enough people, their win rate will naturally go down and while you can argue that this is somehow wrong or reducing hte integrity of debating on this site, this is not a professional debating site and was never intended to be either. This website is very clearly a social forum that is based around the sharing of opinions, debating is a major part of that but it is not the main thing that attracts the clientele. The forums, opinions and polls sections are clearly not designed for competitive debating and it is important for a community to worry about all aspects of its wellbeing, not just what it does on a superficial level. If this site gets disrupted, very few people will use it and those people will be severely antisocial which would make the entire point of this website defeated since the vile trolls left behind would all be extremely abrasive to one another and have no respect for each other's opinions. The best way to get rid of them is to ban them but the second best way is to pressure them into leaving. The reason why banning doesn't always work is that not only is it possible to troll without breaking any rules but the nature of gang-voting means that it would be possible for a socially acceptable member to lose regularly but it would be impossible for an antisocial one to win regularly and this is the key point. Last but not least, this entire concept would be impossible to enforce. The only way to ever catch people out would mean violating certain privacy settings and that would just encourage them to use off-site means of communication immediately which would defeat the purpose and would also drive many users away due to the snooping that the mods would have to have done to confirm the gang-voting. Users have a right to privacy, that is why the site allows users to select several alterations to their privacy settings if they are happy to be open or not.