Are You a Super Geek? Here’s the One Site You Must Belong To

How-To Geek

By Lowell Heddings

Published Aug 18, 2009

Are your geek skills primed and ready for a challenge? Super User is the place where you can show off just how good your skills really are. If answeri

Are your geek skills primed and ready for a challenge? Super User is the place where you can show off just how good your skills really are. If answering questions isn’t your game, it’s also a great place to get your really difficult tech questions answered.

What Makes Super User Great?

First, and most importantly, Super User was created by a group of guys that really believe in putting the reader first—they aren’t going to sell out and flood the site with obnoxious popup ads. I’m putting the How-To Geek reputation on the line and officially announcing our affiliation with the Stack Overflow network, which includes Super User. That’s how strongly I believe in this site.

This doesn’t mean any changes to How-To Geek, this affiliation is just our way of expressing our mutual respect, and working together to make the web a better place for geek information. And the How-To Geek Forums remain a great place to get computer help, or just talk about geeky subjects.

What is Super User Exactly?

At its core, Super User is a question / answer site (and only real questions are allowed). But unlike a traditional forum, Super User is editable by (almost) anybody, very similar to Wikipedia. This means that a group of users can contribute to helping put together the best answers, or tweak the question to make more sense. Before you freak out, everybody’s going to change my posts! you shouldn’t worry, it doesn’t mean that everybody is going to edit every one of your posts.

Super User has a reputation score that is tied to everything that you do. If you answer a question and somebody gives you an up-vote, you’ll gain reputation. If you ask an interesting question, you’ll gain reputation. Once you’ve built up enough reputation, you will be automatically given the ability to re-tag posts, edit questions, and more. This means that only the best, most trustworthy geeks will be making edits to anything, and there are moderators to make sure everybody plays nice.

Super User Has Reputation Scores, Badges, and More

Once you’ve logged in—using your Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID credentials—you can immediately start answering questions, or ask one of your own. Every time your questions, answers, or comments are voted up, your reputation will increase—showing off just how much of a geek you really are.

As you interact throughout the site, you’ll be given badges for various accomplishments—once you’ve left 10 comments you’ll receive the Commentator badge, down-voting will give you the Critic badge, or your answer being voted up 10 times will give you the Nice Answer badge.

The Best Part: Killer Geek Information!

All the badges and reputation score in the world won’t matter one bit if the content isn’t very interesting, but that’s the great thing about Super User—you can ask just about any computer-related question and get very interesting answers.

Here’s just a few of the recently popular threads—and the site has just opened out of private beta, so it will only get better.