You are right about banning the rankings would bring down the fights.. but only slightly. For IF, it would mean lowering the 'hits' by at least 50%. The ranking system is all about getting more hits.. views, comments, buzz, fans.. I don't think any person would do that to their own website.
Everybody knows that these rankings do not really mean anything outside IF. If they wanted a meaningful ranking system, they would have included points for TRP at least - but that's not the case.
Young fans go to any extent to bring their favorite celebrity on top. I have done that when I was younger 😉 and had lot of free time - the celebrity was on peak even when not doing any show. I know it sounds stupid, and I won't put in my time into that today, but again I do not regret spending time on this earlier. I still don't think I wasted my time 😃 then because I learn a few things about how internet and some other things works.
Even though the system is modified sometimes, it only could create other problems. One of it is MID's. They say they are dealing with MID's, but I have a question for admins. Do they really think the top celebrities have 11000+ unique fans? There are too many glitches in the system and one can take advantage of it if they wish. It's really not that difficult to get rid of some MID's. Why not begin with removing ID's (after few warnings) who have not logged in for years on IF? That's the simplest I could think of - there could be many ways, but I really don't care.
Frankly, people who do not like ranking system, should not even look at the ranks and it would solve the issue to some level. I don't care about to what level fans go - all I care about is to be able to say 'I did not like... ' on IF, but even that's not allowed here so all I do is read FFs and see what my virtual friends are up to.