General Account Rules

• Accounts impersonating someone may have their name changed. This means pretending to be someone you are not including individuals, groups, and organisations.
• Usernames violating what is banned in Comment guidelines will be changed.
• NSFW profile pictures showing nudity or extreme violence will be changed to a default image until the user changes it to something appropriate.
• Ban evasion will not be tolerated
• Creating alts with a primary purpose of harvesting any free Manifold bonus or subsidy, or to manipulate a market, is not allowed.

Alt accounts

Creating multiple accounts (alts) is permissible under certain conditions:

• Trading bots submit a Pull Request for a bot tag.
• A single pseudonymous account for making predictions you don’t wish to be tied to you. This must not be used to benefit your main account or deceive others.
• Any other alts created should have a clear indicator in the name or bio stating which accounts it is associated with and not be used to benefit your main account in any way.

Market manipulation

Accounts used for the following will be met with punishment, regardless of if you are abiding by the rules outlined above. This could be an alt, an account of a friend, or any other form of collusion between multiple accounts.

• Abusing the unique trader bonus by consistently betting on markets with multiple accounts.
• Abusing referral, signup bonuses, or daily streaks to funnel mana to your main account.
• Attempting to re-distribute bonuses to others’ accounts
• Using alt accounts as fake identities to deceive others.
• Created with the purpose to manipulate the resolution of a market (eg. “will this market get more than X traders?”).
• Leveraging balances of multiple accounts to boost an account up the profit leaderboard.
  • Holding positions which are then traded off to another account
  • Making trades with multiple accounts on the same market to manipulate the price/odds an account can buy in for.
  • Any other action that could benefit the profit of an account that involves a second intentionally “losing”.
• Users who take advantage of Manifold bugs, break laws, or break other website’s TOS may face punishment depending on the context.
  • For example, botting someone’s socials to cause a market to resolve will be harshly punished.

Insider trading

Unlike many other places, Manifold encourages you to make markets more accurate by trading based on private information you might have. (This is sometimes referred to as “insider trading”). As long as you didn’t have some other duty to keep the information private, such as:

• duty to your company,
• duty to the person who told you this information, or
• a public commitment made on the market,

the Manifold community welcomes insider trades. Caveat emptor!