I've been running this blog on Drupal for a while now, and am generally quite happy with it. The one thing I'd been missing from my days powered by WordPress was a transparent and effective spam blocker. I was so totally spoiled by Spam Karma 2 that everything else just seems like a kid's toy in comparison.
I'd installed the Spam module shortly after I switched to Drupal, but it never seemed to actually block spam. It is pretty handy at removing it, but the URL and keyword matches didn't seem to actually stop spam.
Then, this morning, some spamass decided it would be fun to point his (I'm assuming this jerk is a guy) spambots at my blog. The spam was consistently getting past Spam.module, but it was pretty easy to clean up after the jerk. Still, it's no fun playing mop-up after a cretinous script kiddie, so I rolled up my sleeves to see if I could duct tape a better solution together.
Thankfully, the work had already been done for me, just not updated to Drupal 4.7. The Spam.module for 4.6 ships with a Spam URI Realtime Blocklist module, which will check incoming comments with 6 different realtime-updated shared lists of known spammers.
So, I fired up the Form Updater module, converted the spam_surbl.module code to 4.7, and deployed it. It seems to work so far - of course I'm jynxing it now... I've attached my hack update of spam_surbl.module, which I'm using on Drupal 4.7 here. I'll send a copy to the developer of Spam.module in case he wants to include an updated blocklist module (I didn't convert the .mysql file to an .install autoinstaller, so you may need to run that manually to get the module ready).