[@SilverRain]
You caught the end of it, there. When the supposed botnet finally began to retreat, the server became less overloaded little by little, allowing the main page to be accessed, then the threads, then the topics, and then the actual ability to post. If you got in on occasion before then, it's likely because your IP happened to "squeeze" within the plethora of requests the botnet was sending. It's not outlandish. That also reminds me, [@Mahz] that the site falling was gradual. It began with pages not loading every time and slowly got worse until the site was inaccessible, but gradually became better in chunks.

If you have no experience, go with Python. If you have little experience, try a slightly more difficult, but still high-level language such as Java or C#.