Hi Mike, yes as I posted above (see my quote below) a CAPTCHA is not the final solution for spam defense but a good CAPTCHA will stop *0% of it.
I hope they follow through, I estimate it will take less than 4 hours to clean everything up and put the proper things in place to keep it out. (* hour a day for four days is all it would take)
I would never block an entire block an entire IP range from any country(s) that many of my users come from as my post above explains, the work around I mentioned does work.
If you do or say nothing the answer is no.
Yes it is illegal to sell pharmaceutical drugs on the internet without a license, I'm sure every drug link from this sites points to somebody who is not licensed, (i.e. any legitimate seller of pharmaceutical is not going to spam your site). As for the porn, the law requires a warning to minors before they are shown any nudity, I do not see any warnings here or in any of the porn posts and in fact if a minor were exposed to porn from a link on this forum his/her parents could sue Nettools, if you don't believe that I'll post links of proof.
There is not one single silver bullet solution that will fix the spam problem on its own, it's the combination of road blocks you put up that make it too time consuming (i.e. not profitable) for the spammer(s) to continue, I know this from experience because I'm a security consultant, I get paid to fix problems like this and believe me this is a minor one here that would take very little time to correct. The only reason I posted is because I have used this site in the past to gather information about the spammers and hackers I battle every day and I just wanted to return the favor.
On a side note once this place is cleaned up and proper protection is in place the forum admins will still have to delete some spam posts themselves because the spammers will be testing the system and looking for holes by hand, experience has shown me that this is short lived because it is simply not profitable for them if it takes too much time to post and then it gets deleted in a matter of hours along with their account.
Good luck with all this.