fxbackup

Back up an fxcodebase.com phpBB forum (indicators & strategies) to Markdown + downloaded attachments.

The backed-up archive is published and browsable online at https://docs.gehtsoftusa.com/fxcodebase-backup/.

Note. fxcodebase.com was the community site for custom indicators and strategies for the FXCM Trading Station / Marketscope trading client. It is now defunct — this tool was used to preserve its content before it went offline. All archived content (forum posts and every attached indicator, strategy, and script) is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Porting the archived Lua — Indicore Reader skill

Since the platform is gone, the point of the archive is to port these indicators and strategies to platforms that still exist. This repo also ships Indicore Reader, a Claude Agent Skill that teaches a coding agent to read and fully understand Indicore Lua — its non-obvious semantics (streams that don't start at index 0, the .DATA convention, live-vs-closed-bar shifts, the Ext* signal framework, valuemap trading) — and produce a platform-neutral port specification (or an annotated source copy) for reimplementation in Python, C#, Pine Script, NinjaTrader, MQL, etc. Point it at any .lua file this tool downloads. See skill/README.md.

Usage

python3 fxbackup.py <forum-url> <output-folder> [options]

Example:

python3 fxbackup.py "https://fxcodebase.com/code/viewforum.php?f=17" ./backup

Run it once per forum into the same output folder — each forum gets its own subfolder:

python3 fxbackup.py "https://fxcodebase.com/code/viewforum.php?f=17" ./backup
python3 fxbackup.py "https://fxcodebase.com/code/viewforum.php?f=29" ./backup
python3 fxbackup.py "https://fxcodebase.com/code/viewforum.php?f=31" ./backup
python3 fxbackup.py "https://fxcodebase.com/code/viewforum.php?f=38" ./backup
python3 fxbackup.py "https://fxcodebase.com/code/viewforum.php?f=48" ./backup

Options

Option	Meaning
--workers N	Process N topics in parallel (default 1). Big speed-up on large forums; the site is your own allow-listed server, so 5–10 is fine.
--delay S	Minimum seconds between HTTP request starts, applied globally across workers (default 0.4). Bounds total request rate to ~1/S per second.
--limit N	Process at most N topics (for testing).
--force	Re-download topics/attachments even if already present.
--verbose	Extra logging.

For a large forum a good combination is e.g. --workers 8 --delay 0.15.

Output layout

<output>/
  custom-indicators/                 forum folder = clean forum title
    .forum-id                        marker (which forum id lives here)
    forum.md                         index of every topic (links to folders)
    g/                               first-letter bucket (keeps folders small)
      gann-hilo-activator/           topic folder = clean topic title
        index.md                     the whole thread as Markdown
        files/<post-id>/GHLA.lua     indicators/attachments, grouped per post
        images/<post-id>/ghla.png    screenshots, grouped per post
    h/
      how-to-download-and-install-custom-indicator/
        ...

Topic folders are grouped into a single-character bucket taken from the first letter of the folder name (a–z; digits go into 0-9). This keeps any one directory well under GitHub's ~1000-entries-per-folder limit — some of these forums have 3000+ topics.

• Folders are named after the (slugified) title, kept clean. An id is appended at the end only to break a collision: if two topics share a title, the one with the lowest topic-id keeps the clean name and the others get a -t<id> suffix. Likewise a forum folder gets a -f<id> suffix only if a different forum already occupies the clean name.
• One folder per topic (thread). All messages of the thread are combined into a single index.md, in order, with author and date on each.
• Attachments are grouped by the id of the post they were attached to (files/<post-id>/…, images/<post-id>/…) with their original, clean filenames. Because different versions of a same-named file are almost always posted in different replies, they land in different post folders and never overwrite each other. If two different attachments in the same post share a name, the second gets a (2) suffix.
• Inline screenshots become ![alt](images/…), file attachments become [name](files/…) links. Spaces in link targets are percent-encoded so the links work in any Markdown renderer.

Resuming

Re-running skips any topic whose index.md already exists (and any attachment already on disk), so a large forum can be backed up over multiple runs, or resumed after an interruption. Use --force to re-fetch.

Requirements & notes

• Python 3 standard library only — no external packages.
• The site is behind Cloudflare; this tool talks to it over plain HTTP and assumes the running host's public IP is allow-listed at Cloudflare. If you start getting HTML "Just a moment…" challenge pages instead of content, the allow-list is no longer in effect.