...contacting people's real life Facebook friends unsolicited to shittalk them or sending violent PMs...
GoldTop was the user whom I was referring to...
The thing is though, you know one user engaged in behavior that severe, so why would you be convinced another user wouldn't eventually take a page out of the same playbook and pull the same stunt? It's like saying that "we caught the murderer, so now we never need to worry about anyone ever committing murder again."
Commenting on debates can be ignored, and if the information is being spread publicly it's banned as either call-out thread or cross-thread contamination in most cases.
Unfortunately, I have to say that hasn't been my experience so far.
I don't want to say too much publicly, so as to avoid any possible CoC violations myself, but I do feel that "cross-thread contamination" was only partly addressed in my case, at best.
There's one particular user who has not once voted for the conservative/theist position in any debate, but is apparently now part of the 'high quality vote' group on this site lol.
I believe to know which one you are talking about. I did personally say that I was opposed to the idea of a "high-quality vote group" on the thread which announced said group, because I felt it sent the wrong message.
For what it is worth, I have seen the user in question vote fairly when the topic of the debate is non-religious in nature. Said user voted in my favor on several of my recent debates, and I also stumbled across a few older votes cast by said user which came down on a "conservative" side in political debates which lacked any major religious component.
It seems that there is only an issue on religious debates, specifically if the debate directly addresses the existence of God. Not just that user specifically either, but a number of people will basically say that any debate involving God is wrong by default, and know how to write their justification so that it complies with the rules.
Alternatively, I'm hoping that when "groups" are added as a fully-fledged feature of the site in the future, there may be an option to organize groups to represent Christians and conservatives. This could balance out the unfair votes... or it might just escalate the issue to a higher level of fighting between various groups. I guess we will see...
The only thing that would really be 'problematic' is spamming debate votes, but we kind of have a system in place to take care of that.
It isn't so much "spamming" of votes that I'm concerned about, but more "sniping" of votes by individuals with an axe to grind, or something personal to gain.
It is possible, albeit challenging and time-consuming, to write very long, detailed votes which technically comply with all the requirements of the CoC regarding votes, yet still effectively cast a vote for whomever they personally wanted to win, rather than who actually debated better. (And again, you yourself cited an example where you already believe this is happening.)
Alternatively, legitimately honest votes that are just short statements about why a person won will often fail one or more of the CoC requirements and get easily removed if anyone (even a random uninvolved third party) complains.
So this creates an atmosphere where winning a debate honestly seems to come down to whoever has more allies voting on their behalf wins, particularly if said allies are able to carefully walk the line of obeying the CoC while still doling out the opinions of their choice, intimidating anyone who disagrees and utilizing the moderators to take down votes that don't follow the pattern. The current system grants an obvious advantage to those who are technically complaint with the rules, but still engaging in some obviously biased form of abuse by combining multiple strategies of trolling, low-grade harassment and bias-based voting to ensure a lot of easy debate wins.
Like I said, I don't want to name-names or get too detailed on my specific experience, but if you think it would help, shoot me a PM and I'll point you to the specific incidents I'm talking about.