I'm a little confused.

NodeBB seems to run fine on any other port, so what exactly is the issue with it running on port 80? If I set the port to 80 in config.json, we get no response at all.

I understand running node as root is not recommended but it's not a big issue... this bit of code will downgrade the user to the owner of that file once port 80 is listened on:

require("fs").stat(__filename, function (err, stats) {
    process.setgid(stats.gid);
    process.setuid(stats.uid);
    console.log("Downgraded to non-root user, uid:", stats.uid);
});

So besides from that, are there any other reasons we can't serve on port 80? I don't much want to be messing about with proxies and so on.