Allow Community Maintainers to Make Public Entries Friends-Locked

[kitsoru]

Title
Allow Community Maintainers to Make Public Entries Friends-locked

Short, concise description of the idea
Community maintainers should be given the ability to lock entries originally posted by members as public.

Full description of the idea
As a moderator/maintainer of a few communities, I occassionally have posts that already contain a large number of comments before I am able to tell a user that their post should be locked. If a maintainer could change the entry to friends-only, there would be no issue of losing already-made comments when an entry must be reposted, or of materials being seen by those who shouldn't have seen it.

There are also cases where one wishes to convert a community that was previously public into a friends-only community, but contain posts with large amounts of comments that a maintainer may need or desire to be preserved. While a current post can still be reposted, there is no alternative for saving posts such as these, which would change if maintainer could change entries to friends-only.

Also, as this would only work one way (public to friends-locked only, no friends-locked to public), there would be no issues of private information becoming public.
An ordered list of benefits

• Maintainers do not need to ask users to lock their posts
• Comments preserved
• Old posts that cannot be recreated preserved
• Easier and less potentially inflammatory than outright post deletion

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• Potential for abuse/censorship
• Possibly difficult to program only one way conversion
• If a maintainer mistakenly makes an entry friends-locked, there is no way to convert it back (unless user is able to do so)
• Possible user-maintainer locking wars as per the above

EDIT: Changed all instances of 'moderator' to 'maintainer' and 'Private' to 'Friends-Locked' for clarity.