Last week, DCist’s Andrew Wiseman reported that a NextBus beta site that had been operational for a brief time was removed after inquiries from DCist as to its authenticity. A couple of weeks before, we had asked Metro whether the information we found on the NextBus beta was old or new, and they told us we were looking at old data. Andrew then posted about the site on his personal blog, and a NextBus official responded in comments, announcing that the site was in fact a beta site for the future WMATA NextBus site, expected to formally launch later this year.

At that point, DCist went back to Metro, to ask them whether what they had told us before was true, or whether the NextBus official was right. Metro then admitted the site we had seen was indeed a test site. A short time later, Metro ordered NextBus to take the beta site offline. Even more intriguingly, NextBus later asked Andrew to remove the comment their official had left on his blog. He declined to do so.

Since then, annoyed Metrobus passengers have been complaining. A lot. They’ve complained that they had been using the beta site for a while, and that Metro has ruined their lives by taking it down. They’ve complained that Andrew and/or DCist ruined their lives by doing our jobs as reporters and asking Metro to verify whether the site we had seen was authentic and/or accurate. They’ve railed against Metro’s long history with NextBus, how they yanked the service back in the fall of 2007, and were now seemingly yanking it again.

In his weekly live chat today, Metro General Manager John Catoe responded to some of those complaints.