We should fetch bug statuses from external Mantis installations by page-scraping individual bug reports. This is for two reasons:
* The external bug tracker for Mantis fetches a complete export of the remote bug database, but this is wasteful, and does not fit well with the continuous bugwatch checking work: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/malone/+spec/continuous-bug-watch-checking
* A big reason for adding Mantis support was to work more closely with the ALSA project. Unfortunately we needed ALSA to modify their Mantis installation to (re)enable exports. A positive response came back, but nothing has materialised, so perhaps that's a sign that we need to make our side work without needing changes by third parties. Once things are moving it'll be easier to persuade third parties to integrate more closely, but, for now, we need to get our foot in the door in the least disruptive way we can.
Did you pull the Mantis code to find out if there was a way to inform that bug IDs we wanted in the CSV export? There is an import running so you should be able to bzr branch lp:mantis, fwiw.