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.

UPDATE!
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!

EDIT APRIL 2013:
 I haven't poked on here since I wrote the article. I'm shocked the article actually got any response at all. I was so discouraged over the loss of all my work I gave up for awhile.

Reading the response from myspiteful and the responses that followed ... I have to think it's the lamest excuse I've ever heard in my life and can in a few simple points prove he's either lying or extremely stupid.

Point One: He said the site was broken and he couldn't even e-mail the members to explain things at the time. Quote:

"All was lost, including my ability to email the community about the issue and the closing of the site."

Could he not have posted about the problem on the Urbis Facebook page explaining what the problem was and apologized for it? Was Facebook broken too and somehow I missed it? I doubt it. So that is the first hole in his story. He never said squat about it anywhere online. He can't say he had no way of communicating with the users. Unless he's really stupid and somehow didn't think of that. But, that's a bit of a stretch,

Point Two: If funding dried up so badly how come he could afford another project like VYou? VYou obviously would take more funding just to develop the video uploading and pay for the amount of space the site would require for that. I don't know if anyone is aware of this or not, but if you know anything about computers video files are much larger than writing files. Here's what Steve said regarding funds.

"The funding ran dry and I couldn't raise more money to keep it going, because of the economic situation at the time."

Perhaps the economic situation was that he was working on the VYou project right after Urbis was "broken" and honestly didn't give a crap to throw a few bucks at Urbis? ... Hmmm. The plot thickens.

Point Three: I can personally name about 10 people who would have gone into his databases for free and fixed the problem and set up a way for others to recover their work before the actual hosting ended for the website. There were several months action could have been taken.

"but then there was a major bug on the site and no engineer to fix it (I'm not an engineer and couldn't afford to hire one out of pocket"

I happen to be the first person I would name on that list of people who could do it and would have done it for free. I know how to dive into a website and get into the MySQL databases. I know how to code in PHP and Javascript. In the quick fix I could have coded e-mails could have been rushed out to all users in the database informing them of the problem. I could have set it back up so users could come in and recover their work. I could have even had copies of their work set in as attachments and mailed to them. Trust me. Someone from Urbis was bound to be a code monkey like myself who would have loved being the hero of Urbis. Also, the coding is way easier than you think and there's no excuses that it would have been "just too huge" to fix. As any honest webmaster online.

Point Four: This is even mentioned in the main body of this article. People offered to pay Steve to get their work back.

"The funding ran dry and I couldn't raise more money to keep it going"

Uh, gee ... I don't think funding would have been an issue if he would have taken people up on that offer!

The bottom line is this folks; none of his excuses are going to fly here. He did absolutely nothing to help his users. He just ran off and hid like a coward. He wouldn't respond to e-mails or PM's on Facebook except to his friend over a year after this article was posted after the dust settled.

This could have been avoided. The work could have been saved. Steve was just too lazy to even lift a finger to type a message asking for help.

SMH Shame on you Steve. Shame on you.

However, there is a lining ... although it sure isn't a silver one. Steve seems to have learned a lesson despite the Urbis fiasco. Vyou is now almost as dead as Urbis, big surprise there. The site states that they closed April 5th, 2013.

One major difference between Urbis and VYou is that the website is still up and users can retrieve their content if they follow the instructions outlined on the first page. Which involves sending an e-mail and hoping the staff sends you an e-mail back so you can download your stuff. I'm not sure how long that's going to last. You'd think they could set it up so the users could just log in and get the stuff themselves. It seems a very roundabout way of doing things. But eh. It is what it is.

Sincerely,
Kitty Downs.