Customer email activation gives spurious message

-- HikaShop version -- : 4.3.0
-- Joomla version -- : 3.9.21
-- PHP version -- : 7.3.21
-- Browser(s) name and version -- : various

My site is just about to go live and the new customer verification process is giving problems. A new customer creates an account and they receive the email. They click on the email and they go to the website that displays the messages "there is no such account in our database or the account has already been activated". When you check the backend the user has been enabled and activated. The customer can go to another screen and login but that is not acceptable and I will loose customers. Do you have any idea what might be causing this? Many thanks.

Hi,

Can you confirm that the user is not already activated before clicking on the activation link ?
It could be that you had already clicked on the link before and forgot about it.
Or it could be that your email client scans for the links in the emails for security and thus trigger the activation.
Or it could be that your browser preloads the link data before you click on on it for speed and thus trigger the activation before you use the link.
So it's likely not anything you can or need to fix on your website.

Hi, thank you for your reply. I have 3 new test users on different computers and all get the same problem.

Hi,

Can you confirm that the user is not already activated before clicking on the activation link ?
It could also be that you have a plugin which auto confirms the user for some reason and thus the activation link is useless.

Hi,
I can confirm the users are not enabled or activated before they click on the link.

Hi,

Then I don't know why it does that.
It could be an issue with the access levels of the menu items or something.
I would need to directly check the situation on the website.
Could you provide a link to it and instructions if necessary to reproduce the issue ?

Hi, I have carried out more testing with other users and it seems to be a Microsoft Edge issue that is not consistent. Works fine on Chrome, Safari, Firefox on PC and MACs. Many thanks for your assistance.

Hi,

So my first propositions seem to be the correct ones:

Or it could be that your email client scans for the links in the emails for security and thus trigger the activation.
Or it could be that your browser preloads the link data before you click on on it for speed and thus trigger the activation before you use the link.

Either way, not much you can do to avoid that as the problem is on the computer of the user, not on your website.
A solution to avoid that would be to change the way the confirmation works by having the customers enter a code manually after clicking the activation link.
But I don't think it makes sense to go that far and make it more difficult for almost everyone else for a few users.