Not sure why, but in both my nodebb installs, it shows as if I'm not logged in, however if you expand the menu, it shows there like I am.

On the homescreen, I have

Welcome, anonymous.
Sign in to claim your identity and join the conversation.

But, click the menu, and it shows me logged in there and I can goto Admin from there..

@xpcontact This depends on a couple things. Are you running Apache or nginx on port 80 on that host right now? If the answer is no, just change the port to 80 in the config.json and restart app.js.

If the answer if yes, you need to proxy/reverse proxy the connection through apache or nginx.

A couple things I ran into with these configurations.
Apache needs to be on 2.4.x branch to support websockets via proxy.

Running nginx, you need to be on the 1.4 branch of code to support websockets.

There is a guide to this in the nodebbwiki for use with nginx, and I posted my config in this thread http://community.nodebb.org/topic/761/takes-a-few-seconds-for-it-to-show-users-and-that-i-m-logged-in for how to use it in an apache environment.

Verified that I was able to create an account with 'password' as the password. Perhaps a password meter and a basic set of rules to disallow extremely easy passwords.