I cannot find the threads from the front page stories in the forum proper. In the forum thusly dubbed "Frontpage News & Comments", they do not appear, or at least not with any sane method I can see.

Are these not appearing correctly, or was this by design?

Ever since we moved to vBulletin 3 and the new Content Management System for the site itself, we have moved apart the forums from the news comments. This wasn't completely done on purpose, meaning I would have wished there was another solution but due to constraints and constant updates that would need to be done to both backends this was the logical step.

I really miss the news stories as threads in forums too.

It should be possible to write a script that would pull a news article from the stories database and post it as a new thread on the forums. Then rig the script to be run every time a news article is posted or just run it every five minutes.