Post authors are active on all sites

[amneacsu]

This is something I discovered while weeding out the automated GasBuddy.com, census.gov and FB page reposts submitted by authors "Press release submission" and MMNS. Outside of those automated blog posts there are actual content writers that are submitting their own work (I didn't insist on looking for signs of plagiarism), but here's a catch...

These content writers are submitting content to sites in multiple states. They note "content writer" as occupation in their public LinkedIn profile, and probably make a legit living out of it by just picking up news from across the web and reporting on them on the appropriate local site. I guess that's a thing people do, so maybe nothing iffy about it. But then comes the kicker...

They apparently own accounts on ALL sites even if they don't post there. This leads me to think there's some central CnC admin that's managing all of these sites. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't even know where their blog post is ending up and it's someone else approving and pushing their content.

1. Pick any site with the black top bar template (not the red ones - I haven't tried those)
2. Go to a category and find a post written under any person's name. If you can't find any then try another site.
3. Click the person's name, or if the name is not clickable convert it to a slug string and go to site-a.com/author/john-doe
4. Copy "/author/john-doe" from the URL and append it to any other site that uses the same template: site-b.com/author/john-doe.

You will either see a list of their posts on the second site, or the message "No Results" which means they have an account there but haven't posted anything. If the account didn't exist the page would render latest news instead (try it with a gibberish author slug).

I might dig some more into this, maybe do a list of all content writers and see where it goes from there. What do you think, any suggestions?