Ok, I know they can go quite crazy and I usually have around 300 on my forum. However I checked today, and they have suddenly jumped to 1100! Is it normal?
I have never experienced this before, but it's difficult to determine what is normal from what is not.
To me, right now that is shocking. I am part of a network of websites. I own hundreds of different websites and about hundred other part also own hundreds. Many of us have noticed a HUGE DROP in yahoo traffic, almost to non-existance the past few days.
The stats on forums are delayed (15 minutes by default on vbulletin). The bots on yahoo would usually come from different ranges of IPs. Each unique IP is considered a hit. So in reality there aren't actually 1100 bots crawling all over your forum.
I used to have a hangman plug in for vBulletin and hundreds of Yahoo Slurps would play it every day. They kept getting stuck in some sort of loop it would seem. Perhaps something similar is happening with you?
That isn't vBulletin. And yes they are 24 hour stats, but usually I only every have 300 max... 1000 was just loads :O