Sorry, Luis, I am the CADT. I believe you have your timing wrong.
At the time, bugs.gnome.org was run out of some server Miguel had set up in Mexico. It was some buggy, early version of Debian’s bug system that rolled over and died when someone shipped binary data. I.e., all the time.
It was also low on disk space. Consequently, in order to keep it running, I wrote scripts to mass close (and therefore let expire) thousands of bugs. It was that or not having a running bug system. Owen Taylor was most unhappy about the expiration — can’t really fault him — and, I believe, brought in the current bugzilla based system served by Redhat.
There was something about screensaver bugs having jwz’s name on them that caused him to get more than his fair share of the resulting emails. I forget the details of that.