Couldn't you change the homepage link to come directly to here while at the same time keeping that intermediate page live so that those who use bookmarks will still be redirected and thus alerted?

That way your pages viewed statistic isn't being influenced by those who know the forum has changed but come here via click-though on your homepage. (Which I do some of the time if I’m there checking the blog or some such.) I've ended up doing something similar with 2 or 3 hidden redirect pages thanks to newspapers mispublishing links and whatnot.

[Let's play the edit game. I think it's good now.]