Lock Path-Alias Option to Protect Existing Paths

Here's the issue:

When adding/editing content at the user-interface level, a user may decide to change the filename from that which Pathauto would ordinarily default-to... no problem.

Eg.. From default: /I-am-a-Wicked-Person.htm To: /wicked-person.htm

Come some future date, a user might need to perform a bulk update which - you guessed it - reverts all previous changes to Pathauto's defaults... not nice when a site has anything beyond a fistful of pages to maintain.

Proposed solution:

An option on the content creation/edit page for the user to explicitly express that the URL is a user-defined alias and should not be overwritten at any future point.

I hate to propose something that would probably involve adding another column/table to the database but I think that's the only way this could be achieved (IE... by writing a "1" or "0" alongside the alias as a boolean switch).

I would wager that there are sites out there that have unwittingly performed an update and as a result have broken bookmarks, lost search engine ranks and broken internal linking (where they have been hard "coded" into the mark-up), without realising what has happened.

Without such a feature, the prospect of using Pathauto on a live, organically growing site becomes a most fearful exercise, instead of the pleasure it almost is.

I commend this motion to the house.