I've got a vBulletin message board that is quite active. Does anybody know of a way to force people to go through the front page before they make their way through the forums? I'm getting set to launch a news portal to serve as a "front end" to my vBulletin back-end, and would like to ensure that the "deep linkers" are seeing the front page before they go on their merry way to the forums.

Can anybody point me to a resource on how to make this happen?

or how to annoy members and make sure they don't return very often if at all.

You should be able to do it with .htaccess but if you forum is busy it might put a huge load on your server.

Personally I agree with Chris, it would annoy me as well and I wouldn't return. Plus visits from search engine listings would all land up on the wrong page.

A better way of approaching your news display issue is to put something in your forum pages that catches the attention of the users and lets them click to read if they want to. There are a ton of mods for VB and I'm sure you could find something that would work just nicely.

I'm not worried about people not wanting to return... It's a very popular forum for it's space. Plus its only something that I want for temporary purposes... The first week of the new page opening...

and if people DON'T return it will not stay popular.

As blue-dreamer points out there are many mods out there for vBulletion and there will be some that could get your news pages in front of all visitors without being too annoying.

There is the announcement feature (used at WT) that can put a thread at the top of every forum list, I have seen one that will insert a message in the page above the posts or one something like the adsense mod used at digital point.
There is probably one that will do interstitial pages.
Lots of options about