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07/30/2003: public...locked...oh, public...no wait, it's locked again...
Personally I don't appreciate it when people friends-lock posts that were first public, especially not when a discussion already started. I think there are much better ways to stop a discussion in the own LJ if one doesn't want to deal with it in the own space anymore, or it got out of hand, or whatever. Like asking people to end the discussion, or if that doesn't work set the journal to screening comments for a while (since afaik comments already made will become invisible when the comments option is turned off later, so that's not a good option) until things die down.
Basically I think the authors should have made up their minds on whether they want to discuss with everybody or only with people they know before posting something. I mean, I'm not going to be extremely disgruntled if an author changes her mind once and switches an entry from public to friends-locked, though as I said I think there are better ways to moderate discussion, and the cat is out of bag already so friends-locking it aftwards is only inconvenient for those people not quick enough, who then have to rely on hearsay for the contents of the post. Which usually doesn't improve discussion. What really aggravates me though is flip-flopping a post's status like it happened with that recent controversial RPF post. That is extremely silly and annoying. I mean I read the entry and some of the comments in one of its public "phases" and when I wanted to take another look at the discussion it was locked, then public, now obviously locked again...
I don't have much experience with "friends-lock" etiquette, because I lock very few posts (in my LJ), after all for the most part my LJ entries are just conveniently crossposted from my blog, but I each time I have a reason that's inherent in the post's content (and makes some semblance of sense at least to me). Seriously, I don't get why one would change the status of a post in such a whimsical and rapid fashion.
