Super User turned two years old a few weeks ago. To celebrate, we held a Super Contest to reward you, our dedicated users! To read up on the contest categories, check out the announcement blog post.

Today, we are excited to announce the winners of the 2011 Super User Contest! This year prizes were divided into four categories:

• Level 1 Prize: An official Super User T-Shirt
• Level 2 Prize: $35 of official Super User or Stack Exchange swag
• Level 3 Prize: $100 of Super User or Stack Exchange swag and/or computer hardware or software
• The Grand Prize: $250 of Super User or Stack Exchange swag and/or computer hardware or software

We’ll be working with the winners to figure out exactly what fancy Super Goodies they’ll be receiving. If you’re one of the winners listed below, make sure to watch your email for information about your prizes!

Table of contents:

• Most Valued Super User
• Upcoming Editors
• The Tag Wikifiers
• The Top Guns
• The Editors
• The Bloggers
• The Crap Cleaners
• Summary and Review

The Most Valued Super User

This part of the contest was a first, and the judges were very happy with the results. We wanted to reward those users who’ve shown themselves to be useful to the whole community over time, so we let any user with at least 15 rep vote for the users they thought had contributed the most to the site.

Congratulations to slhck, our Most Valued Super User! With 58 votes, slhck won by a large margin. Comments on his nomination mentioned his great edits, duplicate-finding skills, guidance of new users, and extensive knowledge leading to many a great answer. Slhck has definitely shown himself to be a top-notch user!

In second place, we have BloodPhilia, another one of our most dedicated users. Users expressed appreciation for his positive attitude and helpful contributions. Interestingly, BloodPhilia is only 3 reputation points behind Slhck right now.

We were surprised to find that our third place was a tie! With 31 points each, Gareth and Daniel Beck took third place together. Gareth is perhaps best known for his incredible propensity for editing. He’s been on a multi-month crusade to fix all of the broken links and images on Super User, and also contributes many useful answers while he’s at it.

Daniel Beck is our resident OS X expert, having 7% of accepted answers tagged OS X! He’s well known though for his great answers across many topics.

We also have the following 5 honorable mentions. We had originally intended to reward the top 7 runner-up users, but unfortunately, several of the candidates did not meet all of the listed requirements, despite having many votes in the contest. Several were disqualified for not having earned the Suffrage badge, so remember: vote early, vote often!

    

As it turns out, all of our runner-ups won prizes in other categories, too! Watch for their names further down the list, to see some good examples of why they were voted among our best users.

The Upcoming Editors

This prize is awarded for the users with the most reputation earned from suggested edits during the contest. Each winner in this category will receive a Super User T-Shirt.

Despite not even having full edit rights yet (though it seems he’ll be quite deserving when he does), Lord Torgamus brought us the most suggested edits during the contest, with 99 approved and 0 rejected. His excellent editing skills – which predate this competition – also won him the more competitive Editor award, which surpasses this prize.

Jonsca has only been a member for 4 months, but in that time has made over 160 edits, 23 of which were approved during the contest.

SgtOJ has been with us for almost two years now, but seems to have been intrigued by the contest – he gained over 500 rep during these two weeks! All of his 17 suggested edits during the contest were approved.

Nikai is a newer user, having only been here for a few months. During the contest, he contributed 14 approved edits, with only 1 rejection. Great editing work for a newcomer!

The Tag Wikifiers

This prize is awarded to the users with the most reputation earned from tag wiki edits during the contest. Each winner in this category will receive a Super User T-Shirt.

Digitxp brought us a total of 283 tag wiki suggestions during the contest, a remarkable feat! He already won a better prize, as you’ll see below. Although 16 of his suggestions were rejected, which would have disqualified him from this award, we still would have given him a prize anyhow – 283 edits is impressive, and 16 rejects are a small percentage of a job well done.

Journeyman Geek contributed 27 tag wiki suggestions, with only 3 rejections. Since he was also a MVSU runner-up, his double Level 1 prizes get upgraded to a Level 2 prize. Congratulations!

Mechanical Snail suggested 11 tag wikis with only 1 rejection.

Breakthrough suggested 10 tag wiki edits, and had 0 rejections. Since he already got two other prizes though, this prize goes to the next user…

Diogo Rocha takes home the final tag wikifier prize, with 5 tag wiki edits during the contest.

The Top Guns

The Top Gun awards are for those users who’ve gained the most reputation. The first category, the top gun rookie, goes to the three new users who gained the most reputation during our contest. The second category is to reward efforts over time, and goes to the top three users gaining the most reputation this quarter, as shown by the Super User Reputation Leagues.

KCotreau won the most reputation this quarter, as the only user earning over 10k. Unfortunately, he is not currently participating in Super User; a requirement for eligibility for the Super Contest.

Grawity is earned the most reputation of eligible users this quarter, and takes home a Level 3 prize, for earning 8697 reputation points this quarter.

Breakthrough earned the second most reputation, with 6459 this quarter. As a MVSU runner-up he already won a T-Shirt, but winning this category upgrades that to a Level 2 prize!

William Hilsum earned 5382 reputation this quarter, putting him in 3rd place. As another MVSU runner-up, he also won a T-Shirt. As we said in the announcement post, anyone winning two Level 1 prizes would get a Level 2 prize, so congratulations Wil!

The Editors

Asking and answering questions makes up the core of Super User, but somebody’s got to keep information up-to-date, clarify unclear information, and keep things tidy! These users have done a good job of improving others’ content. Perhaps they should pursue careers in writing, not computers?

Both Gareth and Slhck qualified for this award, but their MVSU awards trump this one. Nevertheless, we’d like to thank them for their fantastic editing help.

Lord Torgamus, known to some of you as Popular Demand on Meta Stack Overflow, was chosen as our top Super Editor. Lord T’s edits range from making minor clarifications and grammar fixes to giving a bad question a make-over into a fantastic question. For all his great edits, Lord T gets a Level 3 prize.

Simon Sheehan, one of Super User’s younger users, has proven to be a prolific editor as well. It might have something to do with all the writing practice he gets from all his great posts on this blog. One of the edits we looked at took a two year old question from 1 vote to 4! Simon is definitely deserving of his Level 2 prize.

Lance Roberts has also brought us many useful edits over the years. He’s one of our top editors of all time, with over 400 edits to his name. In a nod to his editing prowess, we’re putting an official Stack Exchange pen in with his new Super User T-Shirt.

The Bloggers

The Super User Blog has been running for 8 months now, but we’re still always looking for new writers!  To encourage our current writer and attract new young writers we opted to have a category for the best blog post.  We had a total of 5 entries, and all of them were great.  Each of the entries will be featured on the Super User Blog over the next several weeks on Wednesdays, with the top post kicking off next week.  We encourage each and everyone of the bloggers that submitted a post, to continue to write for us.  Our winners for the best blog are:

Building a NAS Server by sblair, an excellent post about selecting components for, building, and setting up a custom NAS – all for cheaper than buying one off the shelf!

Daniel Beck, is our runner up with his post on Customizing Your Bash Command Prompt, a must read for anybody who spends time in the Terminal.

Since Daniel Beck is such an outstanding Super User competitor, and tied for 3rd place in the MVSU contest, he’ll just have to accept that Level 3 prize, we’ll give this Level 2 prize to the next contestant in line.

berk98, a new Super User, takes second place with his post on Five Ways of Finding the Right Power Supply, an often overlooked component of the PC. Make sure to check out his advice the next time you’re building a new computer!

Jcrawfordor who is already a blogger, came in third with an excellent post on laptop security: It’s Saturday Night: Do you know where your laptop is?   His post has already been posted on the blog.

The Crap Cleaners

You might not realize it by browsing around the site, but Super User gets quite a bit of… shall we say, sub-optimal content. From duplicate posts to spam and questions that look more like binary than English, there’s a lot of cleanup to do. Fortunately, we have a dedicated group of users who work hard so that you don’t see too much of that stuff. We shouldn’t have been so surprised when it turned out that five of the top 10 crap cleaners were MVSU winners, moderators, and the Community user (who was also nominated for MVSU, but had to be removed since technically it’s a moderator, and technically it’s not a real person, or so we’re told). Of the remaining users:

Digitxp helped clean up the most junk, with a total of 378 edits, close votes, and useful flags. Most of this came from his post edits, but he also contributed a healthy number of close votes and mod flags.

Soandos takes second place, with 221 actions. Most of this came from moderator flags, with 143 helpful flags during the competition! This Level 2 prize will supersede his MVSU runner-up T-Shirt for a nicer prize.

Tamara Wijsman, in addition to being a MVSU runner-up, also took the third place for the Crap Cleaner award, with 201 actions. Tamara’s clean-up included nearly equal amounts of flagging and closing, and a lot of edits. For winning two Level 1 prizes, Tamara will be upgraded to a Level 2 award.

Summary and Review

Phew! That was a lot of prizes, for a lot of awesome work! Thanks to everyone who participated in the contest, and for your great contributions to the site over time. It’s the dedicated community that makes this site what it is. In case you were confused (and it’s fine if you were – imagine the time we had figuring all the winners out!), here’s a quick table to figure out exactly who won what. Congratulations are in order for all of these users!

User	Category won	Prize
slhck	MVSU 1st Place	$250 SU Swag and Hardware/Software
BloodPhilia	MVSU 2nd Place	$100 SU Swag and Hardware/Software
Gareth	MVSU 3rd Place	$100 SU Swag and Hardware/Software
Daniel Beck	MVSU 3rd Place	$100 SU Swag and Hardware/Software
William Hilsum	MVSU Runner-Up and Top Gun 3rd Place	$35 SU Swag
Journeyman Geek	MVSU Runner-Up and Tag Wikis 1st Place	$35 SU Swag
Tamara Wijsman	MVSU Runner-Up and Crap Cleaner 3rd Place	$35 SU Swag
Breakthrough	MVSU Runner-Up and Top Gun 2nd Place	$35 SU Swag
Soandos	MVSU Runner-Up and 2nd Place Crap Cleaner	$35 SU Swag
Lord Torgamus	Super Editor 1st Place	$100 SU Swag and Hardware/Software
Jonsca	Suggested Editor 1st Place	SU T-Shirt
SgtOJ	Suggested Editor 2nd Place	SU T-Shirt
nikai	Suggested Editor 3rd Place	SU T-Shirt
Digitxp	1st Place Crap Cleaner	$100 SU Swag and Hardware/Software
Mechanical Snail	Tag Wikis 2nd Place	SU T-Shirt
Diogo Rocha	Tag Wikis 3rd Place	SU T-Shirt
grawity	Top Gun 1st Place	$100 SU Swag and Hardware/Software
Simon Sheehan	Super Editor 2nd Place	$35 SU Swag
Lance Roberts	Super Editor 3rd Place	SU T-Shirt and a pen
sblair	Blogger 1st Place	$100 SU Swag and Hardware/Software
berk98	Blogger 2nd Place	$35 SU Swag
jcrawfordor	Blogger 3rd Place	SU T-Shirt

Remember, even if you didn’t win something, it’s not too late to get your own piece of SU swag. This very blog is always welcoming new writers, and on your third blog post we’ll send you a free Super User T-Shirt. And of course, there’s always next year! If you have any questions, leave them in the comments, or contact one of the judges directly.