Confirmation email - the link does not work

[vad R]

I signed up for this forum, and received email “To fully activate your account, we need to verify that you own the email address you registered with. Click here to confirm your email address →”
When I “click here”, I see

Not Found
You seem to have stumbled upon a page that does not exist.

[PeterJones]

@vad-R ,

Hmm, most of the time, people complain that they never get the email. But you seem to have received the email, but just couldn’t click the confirmation link. So you made it one step farther than most people do. Lucky you. ;-)

Don’t worry, having a “confirmed email” actually only allows you to receive “notification emails” from the forum; most of us have lived without those notifications for years. If you want to find out if someone has replied, just come here and check your notification bell at the website, rather than relying on email (which often get caught by spam filters along the way, so they don’t make it to you reliably, anyway).

[PeterJones]

For this specific instance, debug continued in chat (because of privacy issues).

But if you are a reader in the future, who is encountering the same thing:

The link you are provided in the confirmation email is a one-time link. So if you follow the link twice, or if you accidentally hit “reload” in your browser, or if your browser for whatever reason requests the page twice (view source, reload, network confusion, …) then the second time will give a “Not Found” error. It may be that you never saw the first successful load, even though it was successful behind-the-scenes.