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Comment by lotyrin | Hacker News Reader

The attention to detail in spec output is exemplary.

Uploading to Imgur for displaying card images to users seems like a strange choice, though. Why not have the bot serve its own images up over HTTP and attach URLs to itself? I could even imagine a badges.io style image preparation microservice that could be shared by several playing-card based bot apps.

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Possibly because running a bot client is much different from running a webserver. Dialing outbound to connect to slack is much easier than figuring out or configuring your own canonical URL, opening ports, etc.

On the other hand, preparing hands as a single image seems a bad way of doing this; Does the slack API only allow a single image per conversation? I agree with your preparation microservice idea - There should be (and probably are several) a service that allows you to specify a poker hand as a query string and get back an image of the hand. More simply, though: A webfont and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_cards_in_Unicode

Are images even necessary, anyway?

Unicode has playing card codepoints (the full 52) and playing card house codepoints (️, ️, ️, ️).

Edit: What the hell? Hacker News stripped the Unicode characters?! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156894

You can't control the font rendering in Slack (it's Lato, at a certain size). The Unicode cards are far too small to read.

I did think of that. But you could use the symbols for the houses and pair them with a number/letter.

The Slack API only allows a single image URL for attachments. I was also keen on the idea of being able to swap out the card assets whenever. Unicode playing cards is a decent idea, except Slack only renders in Lato.

Does Slack accept images with data URIs instead of URLs? Seems like it'd give you the best of both worlds.

    >  preparing hands as a single image seems a bad way of doing this

I don't believe there's another way to display them inline?

I saw it on HN a while ago- a webservice that does poker hands using a URL; you could pass it cards in the URL and it would display them.

deckofcardsapi.com, if it's the one I'm thinking of?

Clearly the author is able to watch imgurl access logs... (or does imgurl list number of views for images? With good enough timing, that might be enough...)... ;-)

The [imgur](https://github.com/kaimallea/node-imgur) API lets you upload an image (anonymously) and responds with a URL. I promisify'd that and the result is super straightforward. You don't even need to auth.

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