Category: Webhooks

This is my first controversial post on this blog. This week I developed a slack-bot that could notify a channel whenever a Pokemon was in the vicinity. The library I used has received a cease and desist order which is why I wont be sharing the code in this post. I do not encourage botting/farming in the game. The purpose of this post is to understand Webhooks and the Real Time Messaging Protocol. I do not endorse the library used or have any association with its developers, neither have I assisted in the development of the library in any way. The solution architecture of the app can be found below.

I created a separate Pokemon Trainer Club account for use with the API, and hardcoded a given location for fetching pokemon. Once the API returns the list of pokemon in the vicinity I find the nearest one and compose a slack message object which looks like the following.

slack.webhook({ 

               channel: "#general", 
 
               username: "Pokemon Alert", 

               text: "There is a " + pokemon.name + " at " + pkmn.distance + " meters", 

               attachments: [{image_url: pkmn.image}] 

              },url); 

All pokemon found are written to mongodb along with their location and time of discovery, which can be used for later. After the 0.13 update to Pokemon Go, Niantic introduced some server side changes by implementing encrypted variables inside valid requests, which completely broke the library I was using. However if the contributors to the library manage to reverse engineer the changes and make it operational again one could continue developing this application. Anyone with academic curiosity about the project can shoot me an email and I will add you to my private git server where this repository is being hosted. Here is what The application looked like when it was running.

I also host my own slack team . I can give out invites if this app gets working again then you guys can see it in action. I would like to end this post on the usual scope for improvement section and also a valuable message.

Scope for improvement:

• Make the whole project functional.
• Allow for communication with the slack bot such as asking it to scan a particular location.
• Perform some sort of Data analysis on the Pokemon found.

Go team Instinct!