LONDON, Nov 14 (Reuters) - London Metal Exchange rules on daily price swings were breached on Monday, traders said, with offers to sell nickel above the 15% limit placed in volatile trade for the first time since the March debacle when the exchange imposed constraints.

Disorderly trade on March 8 pushed nickel prices to a record above $100,000 a tonne. The LME cancelled all nickel trades on that day and suspended the market for more than a week.

When the market reopened, the exchange imposed price limits of 15% up or down and ordered its members not to submit any orders outside those boundaries.

An LME notice in March said a failure to comply with the new rules "may be treated as a breach of the LME Rulebook, and the LME may take disciplinary action accordingly".

"The LME implemented a rule-based prohibition on the submission of orders outside the daily price limits...to ensure that participants do not place orders that give false or misleading supply and demand signals," the exchange said.

"The LME recognises the operational challenges of this approach for market participants and in the longer term intends to automate order rejection outside the daily limits."

Traders said on Monday orders were placed above the 15% upper threshold of $30,960 a tonne soon after the LME's nickel market opened after 0800 GMT, as market players rushed to cut bets on lower prices of the metal used to make stainless steel.

One trader sent Reuters a screenshot showing an offer at $31,060 a tonne on the LME's electronic trading system Select.

"Why can't Select automatically stop bids and offers that breach the limits?" another trader said. "It shouldn't be up to us as users of the exchange... things can get very heated, as we saw this morning, there should be failsafes in place."

Traders said the exchange was working on a new version of its electronic platform which will ensure limits cannot be broken, but that it has no plans to update the current version of Select to stop bids and offers breaching daily limits.

Night trading - from 0100 London time - for nickel has been suspended since the March debacle. "They can't restart nickel night trading till this flaw in current system is fixed," another trader said

The exchange, the world's oldest and largest market for industrial metals, is owned by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd.. (Reporting by Pratima Desai and Eric Onstad; Editing by Jan Harvey and Susan Fenton)