We have been pointing a lot of users to pull down the .zip file from the downloads page as opposed to pulling the source from github. My question here was if I were to only have the .zip file on my machine, could I still run the node.js server from there, or do I need to pull directly from github? My guess is it shouldn't matter one way or the other.

We'll likely be moving to github releases anyway, so my comment is likely to be outdated soon anyway :)