The organisers of the upcoming Vidcon have told creators that they should not organise meetup events with fans.

Vidcon CEO Jim Louderback has told Polygon that this year’s event has taken the official stance of discouraging such gatherings. The catalyst, mainly, was an incident last year when Logan Paul was stampeded by fans.

“We are definitely encouraging people not to host unofficial meetups,” Louderback said. “If we can, we’ll set up these more structured meetups. You can actually meet fans and say hi in a way that’s structured, and that isn’t going to cause a free-for-all."

Crowd control

“We have people show up to VidCon who are big creators with huge followings that we might not even know, and they get an industry badge, and they may walk in and all of a sudden have 20, 30, 40, 50 people surrounding them," Louderback added. "Though it starts off great, just a nice, ‘Hi, how are you,’ it can get a little unsettling.

“150 or 200 people running over because so-and-so is over in the corner talking to fans has the potential to cause big problems. We work really hard to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’ve got security in place so if we do see things like that develop, we just make sure that everybody stays safe and figure out how to work with it.”

The aforementioned Logan Paul incident was certainly not helped by the fact that the controversial figure had hidden $3,000 in and around the venue. Suffice to say, this sort of activity is also being discouraged.