Woody wrote:A feature that has been inactive for many years*
...
*Possibly never active at all. bookworm?
Fact checker reporting in.
It would appear that this feature, though available, was in fact never activated on the current forum. There is confirmation that it was left disabled at the launch of the phpbb3 conversion, and I am unaware of any mention that it was ever turned on subsequently. If it ever was, it was certainly only for a short time before being deactivated again, as whenever this subject has been brought up it has been in context of it being off and questioning if it should be turned on.
Whether this was
ever on for us, going back to the original message board, I can’t say. Did the phpbb2 vault even have such a feature? I don’t think it does on the Stock Market site.
Woody wrote:this is something that has been requested quite a few times, and never protested**
This is utterly false. The subject was discussed
in this thread and raised a great deal of opposition. Reasons spanned from people simply not thinking the information was necessary to having real concerns over the effect it would have on the community. I have singled out some posts from the discussion below; you can read through the thread to see the full range of responses.
darcie wrote:EK and I decided during beta testing before converting the board to disable this feature. We felt like having a ranking of users with the most cash would be in contrast to the overall spirit of the board and its members. Not only that, but one user with way more ToO cash than others was what led to Shadowpaw creating the Fenix/Gabe story arc and stock market dissolution in the old board.
Laurie wrote:I honestly don't care who the richest ToOer is, nor do I want to know. It is none of our business anyway.
Musical Shutterbug wrote:Besides, it will only increase competition between ToOers. We already have too many people who are focused on their post count. Do we need to make them start thinking about their money, too?
The Top Crusader wrote:No, because then people with a lot of money would be annoyed by candidates running for office trying to raise money, or something.
Full disclosure: I actually support the enabling of this feature myself, I bring the above up simply to correct inaccuracies as is my function here.
I personally see no reason not to have this turned on since the information can be easily found elsewhere even if it is off. If this was revealing something that otherwise would have been a secret, then I’d have to think about it, but as it is a user’s cash on hand and cash in the bank are displayed right on the profile. So you can already get the figures yourself and do manual comparisons, all this feature does is do the tallying for you.
I am annoyed by the choice of words the list uses though, it is confusing. “Users with most cash” doesn’t actually show the users with the most cash, those are the users that have the most cash
on hand, or not in the Bank. Likewise “The richest Banker” only takes into account cash
in the Bank, so it’s the users who have the most cash stored there, they may not necessarily be the richest overall.
What I would find interesting is a list that combines cash on hand with that stored in the bank so we have a picture of figures that actually mean something. Having the cash split up like this doesn't really tell us much of use. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be such a cumulative tally built in, so someone would have to do the number crunching manually. Which T.S. was awesome
and did.
So, from now forward, the 
Now we can know that the top three bank holders own about 50% of all the cash in the bank.
If only TS had had this at his disposal when making his beautiful ToO cash pie chart. 