Everyone can claim to be a partner of BitShares no one can stop you from saying so.
However we did not remove the partner status of anyone because such a status just does not exist, yet.
If you want to become an approved BitShares partner do a representative stakeholder voting.
But if you just want a prominent place on the forum, then you have to deal with the forum users.
And they decided for now to have a clean forum without a misleading Partner section (including mostly inactive threads).
Else everyone could claim to be a partner that deserves a prominent spot on the forum too.
The decision was not made to make "Partners" cry or to blame anyone but just for a better and cleaner forum.