The fall of Urbis.com

Before I begin this massive tirade ... I feel the need to introduce myself.

My name is Kitty Downs and I'd like to think of myself as a professional writer. This is only my Pen Name, (Pseudo Name) much like Richard Bachman is Stephen King's pen name. I had a lot of writing, short stories, novels, articles on netiquette and etiquette, and reviews that were meticulously and at times even painstakingly typed up. All of my hard work is long gone, however. It’s all gone due to a man known online as Steve Spurgat. It’s fitting that my first article since is one that ousts him as the scumbag he is. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not so loathsome a human being that I would attack a person purely on what they’ve done to me. I was only one of many writers who lost all of their work because of this man. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands of writers suffered from this mans actions. I know that must be hard to believe ... but I’ll expand further.

Let me tell you a tale of a website for Writers and Poets known as Urbis.com. It was a writing website with the tagline “Find Your Voice - Find Your Audience”. It was a place where writers could showcase their writing and receive reviews and critique to further develop their writing. They would help each other with grammar, spelling, and style. It was a semi-professional setting where writers could network with one another. I only concentrated on posting my writing while others took the time to utilize all of the sites tools and kept up with the empty promises of updates and new features that were never developed … Many writers hopeful of being published used the site to develop their writing into refined pieces of literary art. All of their developed work from poetry to novels was stored on the website.

The owner or CEO of the site was Steve Spurgat. He was featured in the July release of Esquire Magazine because a good number of their writers on staff used the website.

As time went by the site received less and less care from Steve himself. Since 2008 Steve stopped updating the Facebook page for Urbis.com.

One day in Sep 2010, without any warning from Steve, the website was shut down. It wasn’t gone it was just inaccessible. If you visited the site you got an error message and could not log into your account.

Application Error

Ouch. Something isn't right.

If it's our fault, we've been notified. If it's your fault, we forgive you.

Let's just move on with our lives.

Steve gave no warning prior to the shut down. There was no time for anyone to recover their writing from the databases! Other sites that shut down warned their members and gave everyone at least a month to backup their work somewhere else.

Most writers on the site, myself included, only had our writing up on this website. I concur that it wasn’t the wisest move, keeping your writing stored in only one location, but Steve himself promised that it would be a safe place to store or backup your work. Blindly we all believed this was true. However, even if most of us had backed up the work, we had edited our writing on the site according to the advice we got from other writers. The work saved may have been, in most cases, first drafts and older pieces. The most current versions of the works were mainly on Urbis, where they had been edited frequently and refined. This in any case makes them worth more than the first drafts. But, we should be lucky to have at least that.

Many tried to message him since the sudden shut down in Sept and he dodged all inquiries as to what was wrong with Urbis. Many asked, some begged, while a few even offered to pay to get into their accounts to get their data back. At the time this may have been possible. The website was there only with the error message on the front end through May 2011. Had he acted sooner, and he had months to do so, he would have been viewed as a hero. He would be viewed as the one who saved the work of all of those writers, both professional and hopeful amateurs. However, he logged into his social networks like Facebook, continued work on VYou, and completely ignored everyone as they beseeched him for help to save the work they trusted to his service for months.

As many of us searched for answers we hear that Steve either gave up on Urbis because it wasn’t turning into the fortune and fame he had hoped, or that his ego as a writer was somehow hurt, from what no one can be sure. It's mentioned by many of his jilted writers that he wanted to be a self made millionaire with the website following the success of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, and Tom Anderson, the original creator of MySpace. According to sources, since things were not going as he had originally hoped, he just dropped the Urbis project. Whatever his reasons may be, he gave none of the users of Urbis any notice or warning that something was wrong. He doesn't even have any lame excuses for his sudden drop of the project. He’s simply not talking! He has already moved on with his newest project, VYou, leaving all of us to try to pick up the pieces of our shattered dreams of having professional writing careers. His reasons are not good enough no matter what he may say. He had ample time to warn everyone and let them recover their intellectual property!

Now the website seems to be completely gone. It’s possible that the databases that held all the information have been deleted along with the rest of the website. If this, as horrific as it is, has happened then it will be impossible to get the writing back. All the data is most likely gone and Steve himself could have saved it if he cared.

Now we boil down to the end of this sickening tale … many writers online are still hopeful that they can get their work back. Writers who have near to completed novels and poetry they hoped would one day be published. This work did not take them just hours or days … but months and years to complete! Work they can never get back. Many of these writers, me included, have to start over from scratch! Many of them will give up and quit they lost that much work. Many of them may even face problems if writing was their career and their articles were locked up in Urbis’s databases. The damage, backlash and consequences could be overwhelming! I know one writer who contemplating ending her life when she lost her work years ago due to a computer crash. How many will feel the same with the downfall of Urbis and their writing?

I urge everyone who lost their work to contact an Intellectual Property Lawyer. In no part of the Terms and Conditions of Urbis.com did it state that your work would belong to Steve. You are entitled to your rights as the intellectual property owner of the work you created and subsequently lost due to his blatant negligence! Steve has a lot of answering to do for the role he played in the last few months. He had plenty of time to respond. He could have done something but he flat out refused! I urge you to take action against him for your losses. Especially since the loss of your work can be such a huge thing!

I’m moving forward with my writing career despite this catastrophe. His screw up may have caused my previous work to be lost but I will not give up my dreams. I only hope he gets what he deserves for his lack of compassion towards those who trusted him.

I've changed my Pen Name from the original pseudo identity and I’m reinventing myself and my writing style.

Everything I’ve posted here is fact, except for why he actually dropped the project which is purely speculation on the behalf of those who followed him, and I have a number of angry writers who can back me up on this.  Why he quit only he can say for sure ... but we can never truly trust him again and how can we believe whatever excuses he comes up with are not lies?

In any case, he should be thrilled to have yet another article all about him on the web.

<b>UPDATE!</b>
A kind reader, Dylan, left a comment on this article with a possible solution to the problem at hand.
The Internet Archive! It creates copies of websites and archives them. You may be able to retrieve your writing if you're lucky!

The Urbis Home Page:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090226202528/http://www.urbis.com/

Profiles:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090314111008/http://www.urbis.com/username

Comment below and let us know if you're able to recover your writing with Dylan's awesome tip! Be sure to give him a huge thank you!