Please check the following exact steps that I run for creating askbot environment:

$ virtualenv askbot
$ cd askbot/
$ . bin/activate
$ pip install yolk
$ pip install askbot
$ pip install psycopg2
$ sudo -u postgres createuser -D -R -S -P user1
$ sudo -u postgres createdb -O user1 userdb
$ mkdir testproject
$ cd testproject
$ askbot-setup
$ python manage.py collectstatic
$ python manage.py syncdb
Syncing...
Creating tables ...
Creating table auth_permission
Creating table auth_group_permissions
Creating table auth_group
Creating table auth_user_groups
Creating table auth_user_user_permissions
Creating table auth_user
Creating table auth_message
Creating table django_content_type
Creating table django_session
Creating table django_site
Creating table django_admin_log
Creating table south_migrationhistory
Creating table livesettings_setting
Creating table livesettings_longsetting
Creating table djkombu_queue
Creating table djkombu_message
Creating table followit_followuser

You just installed Django's auth system, which means you don't have any superusers defined.
Would you like to create one now? (yes/no): yes
NameError: global name 'User' is not defined

The output of yolk -l:

$ yolk -l 
Coffin          - 0.3.8        - active 
Django          - 1.5          - active 
Jinja2          - 2.7.1        - active 
MarkupSafe      - 0.18         - active 
Python          - 2.7.3        - active development (/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload)
South           - 0.8.2        - active 
Unidecode       - 0.04.14      - active 
akismet         - 0.2.0        - active 
amqp            - 1.0.13       - active 
anyjson         - 0.3.3        - active 
argparse        - 1.2.1        - active development (/usr/lib/python2.7)
askbot          - 0.7.49       - active 
beautifulsoup4  - 4.3.2        - active 
billiard        - 2.7.3.34     - active 
celery          - 3.0.24       - active 
chardet         - 2.1.1        - active 
django-appconf  - 0.6          - active 
django-celery   - 3.0.11       - active 
django-compressor - 1.2          - active 
django-countries - 1.0.5        - active 
django-followit - 0.0.3        - active 
django-keyedcache - 1.4-6        - active 
django-kombu    - 0.9.4        - active 
django-picklefield - 0.3.0        - active 
django-recaptcha-works - 0.3.4        - active 
django-robots   - 0.9.2        - active 
django-threaded-multihost - 1.4-1        - active 
django-tinymce  - 1.5.1b2      - active 
html5lib        - 0.90         - active 
httplib2        - 0.8          - active 
kombu           - 2.5.16       - active 
lamson          - 1.3.4        - active 
lockfile        - 0.9.1        - active 
longerusername  - 0.4          - active 
markdown2       - 2.1.0        - active 
mock            - 1.0.1        - active 
nose            - 1.3.0        - active 
oauth2          - 1.5.211      - active 
pip             - 1.3.1        - active 
psycopg2        - 2.5.1        - active 
pystache        - 0.3.1        - active 
python-daemon   - 1.6          - active 
python-dateutil - 2.2          - active 
python-modargs  - 1.7          - active 
python-openid   - 2.2.5        - active 
pytz            - 2013.7       - active 
sanction        - 0.3.1        - active 
setuptools      - 0.6c11       - active 
six             - 1.4.1        - active 
wsgiref         - 0.1.2        - active development (/usr/lib/python2.7)
yolk            - 0.4.3        - active 

PS: I should mention that you can see from the above steps, I followed the steps from official installation documentation: nolink://askbot.org/doc/install.html And the final step here python manage.py syncdb is mentioned in this link: nolink://askbot.org/doc/initialize-database-tables.html

Changed in version 0.7.21: When the script asks you if you want to create a superuser, answer yes if you want to create one. By default Askbot sets admin status(superuser) for the first user created automatically but also supports this form.

Updated ...