I was looking for it too; for me (without adblocker or anything) The text was illegibly merged with the ads on the right side.Interesting. My guess was that our presence at least in some way contributes to some success metric like site visits or whatever.
I was wondering because I accidentally went to the Escapist homepage, and they don't even link the forums any more.
(Ah, ok seems fixed at the moment, the slide-out is with background again)
So: No still linked, but under "More" and mixed into "Policy", "Contact" and "etc"... usually not a place for a community-hub...