User registration creating duplicate contact in CiviCRM

Question

I have a CiviCRM database with lots of contacts some of whom are now going to start creating Drupal accounts. I'm testing the process and have discovered that when I create Drupal user with an email address matching a Civi contact, it creates duplicate contacts instead of merging.

The Unsupervised Individual Email rule didn't seem to be working and, because it's 'reserved', I couldn't see its settings, so I created my own 'email only' Unsupervised rule with Email set to weight 10 and threshold set to 10. Still creating duplicate contacts.

The process of creating the user doesn't seem to affect the issue. That is, I can 'add user' as an admin or create a user as anonymous and Civi reacts the same way. No deduping.

Any thoughts?

Thanks, Lewis

Answer 1

That doesn't seem to reflect experience i have had with this. Creating a Drupal User should create a row in UF Match table with the civi contact with that email, and if there are multiple civi contacts with same email i thought it opted for the one with lowest cid.

If you can't figure what is mis-firing (and have a look at your civicrm_uf_match table if you haven't already just to confirm what is in there) there are possible workarounds to try, eg use a webform, confirm that you can ensure that a match on email, or first+last+email is working in that context, and then you can use civicrm_entities and drupal rules to trigger the drupal user creation - old-ish blog here about process