Site Group vs Variant concept

[JamesMcGhee]

So when we discovered the "variant" concept, we immediately had a use for it ... but not as "variants"
We use it as a site structure

• Dev Hub <-- General purpose information as a site
• Toolkit for Steamworks <-- Large product needing a site of its own
• Toolkit for Unity <-- Another product with loads of articles and its own site
• Toolkit for Unreal <-- etc.

This works okay but sometimes we get a black screen. then we paid a bit more attention ... the drop-down is attempting to navigate to the same page on the other site, just changing out the site slug. While that makes since if your doing a API site where its always in the same shape e.g. different versions of the same API ... well that still in practice never works but its at least a workable idea ... but in our case where its multiple sites related but not at all the same structure this doesn't work at all and while sometimes it will just load the defautl page on that site (the desired behaviour) sometimes it just shows a black screen.

I get we are using a feature in an unintended way, however, its very useful to be able to do a site structure like this. Not as categories or groups of pages in a massively long navigation panel but as separate sites accessible via a drop-down that can link across to each other so basically exactly what you have ... just without the assumption that changing sites wants to keep the same page. I think a simple configuration option at the group/doc sites level, where we configure "variants" to say

True/False: Should we try to match the page when switching sites?

Would make this a much mroe flexable and useful feature

PS: Yes I am aware of Site Sections, no it doesn't do what we would want/need. The drop-down is what we want we just need it to not try and find a matching page on the selected site.