People who give 'hints' are usually people who don't have the balls to tell somebody how the situation is.
Ignoring is rude. I save ignoring for people who are out of order or are incessantly persistent. Girls use ignoring as a technique for communicating "I'm not interested in you" because they don't know how to say it. But girls invariably HATE with a passion, being ignored themselves.
Last 2 girls I've been seeing, one I dumped her the other she dumped me. When I did the dumping, I sat down with her in private, with no one else around, told her that I wanted to go back to being single, then when she fired all sorts of "why" questions, like "was it because of this..." I just answered them. A few weeks later she sent me this long email asking loads of stuff about why we had split up and I answered all those questions as well. I didn't leave any ambiguity over the fact that I had decided it was over, I wasn't trying to keep her as an 'option' but I knew she was upset about the break up so I thought she deserved to have answers to her questions.
Then it came to me being dumped but this was from a pretty short term thing (6 weeks or so). We'd been for lunch and seen each other on the Thursday, getting on fine. Talked a bit on Facebook chat on the Saturday, then that was it. She stopped answering calls, stopped answering texts and disappeared. After a few days of trying to contact her and being a bit worried about where she was, I sent her a facebook message, she ignored it, but I knew she was on facebook because she was 'liking' stuff. It slowly dawned on me over a period of about a week that she had obviously wanted to end it. I was annoyed at this because I didn't know where I stood, and I kept trying to get in touch with her because I thought something must be wrong and I didn't expect her to just cut me off after we had been speaking to each other every day for the previous 6 weeks. What sealed it was, a week or so later she was engaging in flirty facebook wall banter with her ex, so thats when I knew obviously it was up. I never heard from her again and after about a month she deleted me off facebook. Can't say it left me devastated or anything but it annoyed me that I didn't know what the situation was and I wasted a week wondering what was going on where if she'd have just said she wanted to end it I would have known the score.