I had the same thought. So, if you post anything related to real estate or in response to Shelly (or anything else here), it could become a quotation (used in or out of context) in a thesis. There are ethical guidelines regarding academic research, and I'm not sure where this would fall.
Regarding online research, here's something interesting: There was research done in the UK to find the world's funniest joke. People all over the world submitted jokes online and then people would vote on the funniest joke online. Some of the jokes are very funny, resulting in a book that I believe is called Laughlab. The interesting thing is that humorist Dave Barry encouraged people from the US to influence the study outcomes. Here's what the researcher said (you can find the study results and jokes at
http://www.laughlab.com):
"The American data proved to be somewhat strange. Dave Barry is a well known humourist whose columns are syndicated in many American newspapers. In January 2002 he kindly devoted an entire column to LaughLab. At the end of the column he urged readers to submit jokes that simply ended with the punch line: ?There's a weasel chomping on my privates.? Within just a few days we had received over 1500 ?weasel chomping? jokes."
Anyway, the point is we could take Dave Barry's lead and all respond to some of the strange real-estate threads comments with a similar non-sense phrase (we don't have to use Dave Barry's phrase, though that would be OK, too) rather than respond to real estate comments which are getting increasingly sarcastic and less useful (for Shelly, it could be a thesis avoidance strategy). Now that would make it fun to read about real estate again and would certainly be as useful!
