But all of that is already on the portal page, right? Right above any of the newsfeeds, there are direct links to the newest topics/threads within the site. I'm not sure that adding more than those 10 would help much, right?
It sounds like what you're suggesting is to basically make the portal page the index page (and perhaps add a little more forum content into the portal page). I just don't know if that will really make much of a difference. If the portal page wasn't being indexed regularly, there wouldn't be a question, that would be the issue. But it is being hit and reindexed by google pretty much every day, so their index already has anything and everything from that page already, and they already see it as the most relevant ninjette.org page.
I just found the clearest description yet of how my multiple aliases without 301 redirects were hurting the SEO,
here's a link to a decent article on the topic.