Changelog 5/8: Shop Improvements, Silicon Rewards & More

Check out our recent updates!

Good morning and happy Friday! I’ve combed through my notes from the past few weeks and brought you a list of changes we shipped for the site.

Market Boosts

You can now boost a market directly from the creation page! If you know that everyone on the site is going to want to see your genius market, you can go ahead and grab a boost as an add-on instantly.

Boosts are awesome because they put your market in front of everybody for a day, and since March, they now come with a cool bonus of M$5000 in liquidity! You can bet on boost sales here:

Prizes & Charity

The Charity Champion Trophy is now showcased on the Charity page - be the #1 entry holder in the charity giveaway to claim this super-cool trophy from @Eliza. Holding the trophy at any point grants permanent ownership of “Champion’s Legacy” hovercard background.

Don’t care about prize drawings or charity giveaways? Don’t sweat it, turn off the notifications here in the notification settings tab. There was definitely a bug here before, but now we’re 100% sure it works.

If you were one of the first people to buy Prize Drawing entries, you may have noticed that you paid a bit more than you expected. This was due to the way the rates were calculated on the bonding curve: the mana price of each entry increased with each additional one you purchased. This was most noticeable for the first few users in each drawing when the curve was the steepest, but as of yesterday, you will no longer be charged any more than the amount you put in the field! Your total spend will be capped at that amount, even if the bounding rate is steep or another user swipes those cheaper entries out from under you.

Thanks to @MarySmith for adding the Free State Project to the list of available charities! At the moment, the FSP has a 15% chance of winning the $1500 payout, contribute towards (or against) them on the Charity page.

Merch & Shop

In case you missed it: Card purchases with Stripe are back! We still prefer buyers to use crypto to avoid fees, but all verified or grandfathered accounts are now able to use their credit card to buy mana again.

When ordering merch, there’s a new optional email field - if there are any delivery issues, this allows the customs office or carrier to contact you to get it resolved. For Brazil and some regions of Spain, the field is mandatory for duty resolution.

Also, for users shipping merch to Brazil or South Korea, we now collect a personal tax ID, which is required to pass through customs. If you live in one of those countries and had issues with your order, try again now with the updated form! As always, DM @Gen if you have any issues with an order.

In the shop, there’s a new “Owned” tab where you can find every profile and avatar cosmetic that you’ve purchased. Build the right fashion loadout for today’s trading, all in one spot.

If there are no seasonal items available at the time, the Seasonal tab will be hidden. But don’t fear, your previously purchased seasonal items are still visible in the “owned” tab. There’s also a handy tooltip on those items to tell you why they’re hidden in the regular shop.

There’s now a link to the Manifest website on the Manifest ticket in the shop, in case you were wondering what exactly you were buying a ticket for.

There was a secret feature in the shop where you could make the item cards dance by hovering your cursor at just the right spot - the card would raise just above the cursor and then lower back down, jittering over and over again. This has been removed because dancing is illegal on Manifold.

API & Bots

Do you have a bot on Manifold? If you do, and they make over M$100 in profit in a month, they’re now eligible to receive league rewards! The top 6 bots each month will receive rewards similar to other leagues, with the top bot earning M$800.

If you don’t run a bot already, this is a great time to start. You can now mark your account as a bot easily from your Account Settings to automatically enroll in the Silicon League. Ask in the #api-and-bots channel of Discord if you need help or advice from other bot-makers!

For you API power users: All timestamps are now precise! There was an issue with how timestamps (such as a bet’s createdTime) were handled as they made their way from the database through the API server, which led to them being truncated to the second. Now, all timestamps should have proper resolution all the way down to the millisecond.

If you’re placing comments from the API, you should also be aware that we’ll now reject any comment with a replyToCommentId that doesn’t exist. Instead of that comment being lost in the void forever, we now let you know so you can reply to a comment that does exist.

Also, when you go to cycle your API key, the site makes it clear that this will break all integrations using the key instead of referring to the old Twitch integration that no one has used in years.

Miscellaneous

• The daily $100 prize drawing is now automatic! No more waiting until an admin clicks the button. Long-time league members will remember a similar situation way back when.

• Did you know that when you zoom in on a market’s price history, the y-axis shrinks to show you the relevant area? Now that also applies to numeric and date charts! A good example:

• You can now filter the browse page by date markets, helping you find all those “when will X happen” markets to bet down since nothing ever happens.

• When we introduced cosmetics in the shop, we had hardcoded in the names of each item on the stats page, which led to some items in the table being referred to by their internal key. Now everything is nice and consistent, and will update auto-magically.

• Enlarging an image posted in a market description or comment section used to have a bug where a couple of special UI elements would continue to be drawn on top, especially user avatars from the right-hand sidebar on desktop. This is fixed, so now you can watch Supernatural gifs in full screen without any distractions.

• Pro tip: when you hover over a bet in the feed, you can see a lot of detailed information, such as the timestamps, share price, and limit order details. Now we also show a couple more decimals on the mana fields to help you understand exactly how much was spent on each trade.

• On mobile, the leagues horizontal scrollbar now shows arrows indicating that you can scroll, or just press the arrows to move. On desktop, these only show when you hover over the ribbon.

• Some buttons on the sidebar used to be comically narrow, especially the App button. This bothered me way more than it should have, and now all sidebar items are the same width.

Feedback

Any comments or questions about the changes above, feel free to post them below! I’ll do my best to answer anything, and I hope to do these changelog roundups in the future at least once a month. If you see any bugs similar to the ones above, feel free to post in the #bugs channel on Discord, or DM me on Manifold.

- wasabipesto