The Site — Mithraeum Agora

Identity and community

The Agora

The web service. It knows who you are and nothing about what you trade — that separation is enforced by the fact that it was never given a way to find out.

This page is the Agora's own tour: the community layer in screenshots, how signing in to the application works, and the two pieces of engineering worth describing properly. The shared strategy library — where members publish and adopt logic — has its own page beside this one. Where the Agora sits among the four programs, and what is allowed to cross between them, is drawn on Architecture.

The Agora — the landing page

The front door. What a visitor who has never signed in sees first: one headline, one sentence, four ways in. The landing is its own page with its own route — reached from the wordmark — and it never carries the signed-in menu, whatever a returning member had open last time. Captured from the demonstration instance. The Agora has two themes, and its frames here follow the dots at the top of the page: the night dots show its night theme, the day dots its daylight one, which is its own default.

A section further down the landing page headed Regimes that stack, nest, rank — and switch with the tape: a paragraph explaining that regimes are a structure you compose, an illustration of candles moving through trend, downtrend, chop and breakout regimes with a nested child regime, a legend, and a row of feature pills. — **The long read beneath it.** The landing is a single scrolling page of a dozen sections, each an idea with its own illustration — here, regimes that stack, nest and rank, drawn over an invented price path rather than any market's. The illustrations are the Agora's own drawings; nothing on them is data.

Accounts and sign-in

Passwords stored as salted derivations, durable browser sessions, device tokens for the desktop application, and a single sign-on handshake redeemed server-to-server rather than through the browser.

The manual

Authored here and pulled by the application, with the bundled copy acting as an offline floor. One document is the source of truth and it keeps its own revision history.

Forum and library

Boards for discussion and a shared library of contributed material, with reputation grades, moderation and reporting.

Support

Conversations between a customer and me, with an optional diagnostic attachment the customer reviews in full before anything is sent.

What the community layer actually looks like

The frames below are from a demonstration instance carrying the project's seeded content — invented members, invented threads — captured in that instance — the thread viewed as one of those seeded personas, under the mock-demo banner the instance itself paints across the top. The menu's trending sections are folded: they carry the seeded roster's invented figures over real ticker names, which is the one combination this site never shows. Where figures do appear in these frames, they are the demonstration's own arithmetic over app-generated synthetic series, named as such on the card.

The Strategy and logic board: seven threads with titles about regimes, branches and ML operands, each showing its author, their reputation grade, the reply count and the date, with a folded menu rail on the left. — **A board.** Discussion is organised into a handful of boards — strategy and logic, data, brokerage, app help, library. Every author carries a reputation grade, which is what governs who may post and publish.

The Agora — a thread

A thread. Replies carry helpful-votes and a report link rather than a like button. The exchange is about logic — how many regimes are too many, and a rule for telling a real state from a fitted one — which is the only thing this service was built to carry; one reply reminds newer members that a backtest posted here is a study, never a claim.

The Agora — a profile, seen by another member

A profile — the ladder, the badge case, the published logic. The ladder runs from Novitiate to Pythia and governs posting rights; badges are earned across both programs and never bought. The published-logic cards carry the entry's composition — indicators, regimes, bar size — and, where the author attached them, the demonstration run's own stat chips and equity thumbnail over the synthetic series named on the card, the losing entry printed as plainly as the winning ones. Captured from the demonstration instance.

The manual rendered on the Agora at revision 126: a search box, a row of thirty-three section chips from Overview to Know your strategy, and the first section — the workflow, and the workspace bar with a table of each workspace's pages. — **The manual, at its source.** One authored document lives here and the application pulls it; the copy bundled in the app is the offline floor. Because there is one source, the manual cannot say two different things in two places. It stands at revision 126 and thirty-three sections, and it keeps its own revision history.

How signing in to the app works

The desktop application signs in through the Agora, but the browser is only ever a courier. The credential exchange that matters happens directly between the two programs.

Why the redemption is server-to-server. A ticket that the browser could redeem would be a credential living in the most exposed program on the machine. Instead the browser carries a token it cannot use, and the exchange that produces a session happens on a channel it never sees.

Two things worth describing properly

Most of this service is ordinary. Two parts were not, and they are the parts I would show another engineer.

1 — The diagnostic attachment is an allowlist

When something goes wrong, it helps enormously to know what the application was doing. It helps not at all to know what anyone was trading. So a support bundle is assembled from a list of fields that were each deliberately declared — build identity, platform, configuration flags, counts of things, and error types with the code location that raised them.

A field nobody declared is dropped, never sanitised. That is the difference between an allowlist and a denylist, and it is why adding something new to a bundle has to be a deliberate act rather than an accident of a data structure growing a field.
Exception messages are discarded entirely. Python interpolates values into error text, so a message can contain the very thing you were trying not to collect. Only the type and the location survive, and there is no setting to change that.
Redaction happens before transmission, on your machine. Filtering on arrival would be theatre — by then it has already arrived.
You see the whole bundle as plain text before you decide whether to attach it.

Filing a support ticket with diagnostics attached: the whole bundle rendered as plain text — build identity, configuration flags, counts of things and the platform, 666 bytes against a named schema — and beneath it the report form with its warning asking the customer never to type an account number, password, API key, broker login or position into the free-text box. Provider names are redacted. — **Read everything before anything is sent.** The attached diagnostics render in full — build, flags, counts, platform; this one is 666 bytes against a named schema — and what is *absent* is the point: no symbols, no positions, no balances, no keys, because the allowlist has no field for them. Beneath it, the one field no schema can constrain — the description box — carries the warning in as many words, and anything of that kind sent anyway is deleted. The legal terms were amended in the same round that built this, because a support channel is a second path off your machine. Provider names are redacted out of the image.

2 — Closing an account actually closes it

Any customer can delete their own account themselves, re-authenticating with their password, with no blockers of any kind — no "contact support", no cooling-off, no retention hold. Their posts and contributions are destroyed rather than hidden. This turned out to be far more interesting to build than expected, for reasons that are entirely about correctness rather than privacy.

The username is released immediately, which means somebody else can register it tomorrow. Every commercial record was keyed by username. A surviving row would therefore be inherited by a stranger — an active subscription, or a used-trial flag denying somebody a trial they were owed. That is a correctness bug before it is a privacy one, and it forced every account to carry a permanent opaque identifier that closed records are re-keyed onto.
One anonymous row survives: an opaque id, a hash of the verified email address, whether a free trial had been used, and the open and close dates. No name, no address, no content. It exists because the once-per-person free trial otherwise becomes infinite — delete, register again, another trial, forever.
The order of operations is the failure design. The account is verified and the record written before anything is destroyed. If the step that re-keys the commercial records fails, the whole closure aborts and nothing has been destroyed — because releasing a username while a subscription still answers to it is exactly the collision the whole scheme exists to prevent.
A thread other people replied to survives, with the opening post tombstoned under a per-closure handle. Somebody else's reply is not yours to delete. Every closure gets its own handle rather than a shared "[deleted]", because one shared literal quietly merges every departed person into a single apparent person.

The check that made this real: after a closure, an automated sweep asserts the username appears nowhere in any store. The first run found five places nobody would have listed from memory — "added by", "updated by", "changed by" fields scattered across unrelated features. A byline is never the only place a name lives.

This site is descriptive, not contractual. Nothing here is a term of service, a privacy policy, a warranty or an offer. Where this page describes behaviour, it describes how the software is built, not a promise made to anyone. Nothing on this site is investment advice.

A personal project. Not advice. Nothing for sale.

This site describes a personal engineering project, written and run by one person in their own time and published under the name Mithraeum Agora. There is no company behind it, no team and no other contributor. It is not a product and not a business. Nothing here is for sale — there is no account to open, nothing to buy, no subscription, no waiting list, and no service is being offered or solicited. Sending a message through the note form creates no customer, client or contractual relationship of any kind. The note form on the contact page is the way to reach me, and it is the only one.

Nothing on this site is investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, or a recommendation, solicitation or offer to buy or sell any security or financial instrument. I am not a financial adviser, a broker, an investment manager or a regulated firm, and nothing here should be relied on as though I were. If you are making decisions about money, take advice from someone qualified and regulated to give it.

Figures do appear on this site, inside screenshots, and none of them is a performance claim. Every one is a demonstration instance's own arithmetic over price series the application generated itself — synthetic data, with no real market behind it — shown to illustrate what the tools display. They are hypothetical and simulated: no capital was at risk, no orders were placed, and a result computed over history with the benefit of hindsight carries limitations that live trading does not forgive. Hypothetical results are not indicative of future returns, and past performance — real or simulated — predicts nothing.

No brokerage, market-data vendor or other company is named anywhere on this site, and where a name appeared inside a screenshot it has been redacted out of the image. Nothing here states or implies that any company is associated with this project, endorses it, sponsors it, supplies it or has reviewed it. None is, and none has.

What this site collects. Nothing, unless you write to me. There is no analytics, no tracking, no advertising, and nothing at all is loaded from another domain. If you use the note form it takes the name, address and message you type, stores them privately where only I can read them, and keeps them for up to a year before they are deleted — sooner if you ask, and you do not have to give a reason. Your IP address is not kept. One thing is stored on your own device: the colour theme you pick, remembered by your browser so the site does not change appearance every time you arrive. It is written only when you choose a theme, and it identifies nothing and nobody. The preference itself never leaves your browser, but the screenshots follow it, so the pictures your browser fetches from this site are the ones drawn in that palette. The contact page answers all of this in more detail.

Terms of use. This site is provided as is and as available, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied. It describes software under active development: anything here may be incomplete, out of date or simply wrong, and it may change or disappear without notice. Nothing on it is a contract, a term of service for any product, or a promise that anything described will be built, released or kept running. To the fullest extent the law allows, I accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from use of this site or from reliance on anything it says. Nothing here excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

Trading involves risk of loss.