How to get started on automating a web forum

I have no experience in web automation and am looking for some feedback/help with this task: - Lets say we have a forum that I don't own or control - say something similar to http://ift.tt/16XyBib - What I want to do is build a site or an app that does some of the following - track posted threads - then run some analysis on these to get stats on the posts, identify keywords etc. - do this on a regular basis or on demand.

What language would I use to do something like this ? What tools would I need ? Unfortunately I have no experience in web automation so not sure what the best approach would be to accomplish something like this. Thanks for the help.