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MySQL doesn't guarantee that rows will be retrieved in any particular order unless an ORDER BY clause is used in the query.
You could try dumping the bb_forums table to an .sql file, changing the order of the rows in the .sql file, and then reloading the .sql file into the database. That might work.
The proper solution is to add a forum_order column to the forums table, and add "ORDER BY forum_order" to the relevant queries in the scripts.