No, that is not the way flagging should be used. My understanding is that flagging leads to automatic killing of stories. If people were to flag the story based

No, that is not the way flagging should be used. My understanding is that flagging leads to automatic killing of stories. If people were to flag the story based on this insignificant evidence, it would get killed even if there isn't anything malicious going on. Voting rings shouldn't lead to a story getting killed anyway. It's technologically trivial to negate the effects of simple voting rings (e.g. a voting ring that would lead to five votes in a minute), so if it's something that is frowned upon, that should be taken into consideration when ranking stories. Can we talk about the actual story now?