Okay, I was able to work on catching up on some playing/scripting today, and feel as though I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I'll begin work on the black box this week.
Right now, I'm trying to think of a way to avoid making every single person create an email/password account to be able to interact with the registry. The mafia GUI will be making quite a few handshakes with the black box (for submissions, edits, deletions, vouches), but without some kind of user verification, since the mafia source is public it could be possible for a sneaky jerk to spoof a mod username and wreak havoc. I'm thinking that, on your first interaction with the registry, if your "registryPassword" property was empty (the default), mafia will prompt you for a password to use with it, then save that password in your properties for all future interactions. The email address seems like it would be necessary for sending forgotten passwords, or for notifying mods of new submissions. Not asking for email would be nicer, but since the server wouldn't be logged in to KoL or this forum, it couldn't send them a kmail/PM.
The server being logged in to KoL would make this all very easy. We could even make a chatBot that interfaces with the PHP script and serves as the registrar! Interactions would occur mainly through chat and wouldn't need additional ID verification, plus since there would be no public URLs the security would be high. Not to mention the great flavor of having an NPC registrar. Major downsides, of course, being that someone would need to keep the bot running, and that the ASH scripting environment is far more volatile. Yeah, ok, actually this is probably not viable, though it would be cool if it were.
Thinking out loud. Well, it wasn't actually audible, I just typed it, so I guess... thinking... visibly.
tl;dr: Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.