[Steven Zahm]

@ tglazier

This is being caused by a script in the theme. The search input has default text that says “Search” because of the theme, that word is being submitted as a search term when you use the category dropdown. You can see it in the address bar. The theme is trying to be helpful by using this “shim” for older browsers that do not support the placeholder text in text boxes. I’ve seen a couple implementations of this shim and they all seem to have this same bug.

Unfortunately, the only fix, is to remove this from the Connections source PHP code. You’ll have to open the class.template-parts.php file and go to line 376.

In that line you will find this:

placeholder="' . __('Search', 'connections')

Change it to this:

placeholder="' . __('', 'connections')