Have you tried wireshark to view the transactions?
There’s always a reason worth living, lol… Everday is new and a new chance at making it great. If there’s a third-party app, I am not knowledgeable of it. Sounds like something for me to research though. I’m new to coding, but i’ve been deep in computers for sometime now. Wanting to get involved as much as possible.
You could, hypothetically, create a dedicated page to the hidden forum and create a custom link tag to that specific forum page. It would create a lot of backend secondary DB work though….
Did you clear your browser cache?
Also, try resetting your permalinks.
Have you tried deactivating and reactivating the bbpress plugin? Also, try to clear your caches and or DB (Don’t delete or “drop” tables) to see if that cleans it up..