We have on our site a physician directory search which has been working cross platform for years. Over the last few months, we have been getting reports that the functionality is broken. My debugging into this issue has led me to find that GTM is actually stripping the URL fragments breaking the functionality in all browsers but IE.
We use Ajax calls to retrieve the directory page by page, 10 items at a time. Some results can yield up to 15 pages, but users are no longer able to get past page 2 of the result set. After page 2 it produces the search page again.
This was rewritten a number of years ago to utilize the URL hash as opposed to using the original cookie based system which simply didn't work. This can be easily reproduced using Chrome by:
- Visit https://www.montefiore.org/doctors
- Click Search By Specialty
- Click Family Practice
- Navigate to any secondary page, you will see that the hash fragments have been striped
- When you try to navigate to any tertiary page, you are simply presented with the specialty list again.
I have gone through various debugging sessions and have even outsourced the issue to our outside developers, but the issue remains unresolved. Any idea on what could be causing GTM to strip out the fragments?