Balete

Balete is a community website management strategy arising from the words "ban and delete". It involves casting a member out of a community, and deleting all traces of their existence.

While usually confined to spammers, sometimes the strategy is used to banish members that the management sees as disruptive.

The practice of banishment or ostracism is not new. It goes back through thousands of years of human and mammalian evolution, and is one of the earliest elements of a criminal justice system. Unpopular members of the pack or tribe were cast out for being offensive, or in times of famine. The Egyptian pharoahs would sometimes have monuments and records obliterated in the case of someone who had been ostracized.

Synonyms from other cultural models include Pogrom (Eastern Europe), Fatwah (Islamic), Excommunication (Roman Catholic), Scapegoating, Witch-Hunt, and Bill of Attainder (English).