mind control mechanism. Involves shunning, or completely ignoring, former members, even to the point of crossing the street to avoid them. See the shunning entry in the Cult FAQ.

(a.k.a. Disfellowshipping): This is a method of disciplining or punishing a member who strays from the group's expected behavior or belief. Other members --often including friends and family -- are expected to have no contact with the shunned individual. In a high intensity faith group where a believer's entire support network is composed of fellow members, this can have disastrous consequences; some have been moved to commit suicide. Various forms of shunning are practiced by Amish and Jehovah's Witnesses

deliberately avoiding; keeping away from or preventing from happening

a nonviolent approach to averting abusive posters either in chat or in posts: simply don't reply or acknowledge anything that's said. This works much better electronically than it did on the playground in grade school.

The act of a Cisco router dynamically reconfiguring its ACLs to terminate a detected attack and to block the attacking IP address from future transmissions through the router for a set period of time.