It really helps me to be able to see the whole bunch of translations when linking sentences, sometimes I link Turkish sentences with French, English, German or Spanish sentences that might not be visible with this new button, and it would be tiring to have to click on the button ten or fifteen times per page to be able to link ten or fifteen sentences.

>Currently, the reason translations ... [snip] ... their 3-letters code starts with a letter at the beginning of the English alphabet.

Perhaps an alternate to sorting the way languages of translations are listed would be to sort them in the order they appear on the "stats/sentences_by_language" page, rather than alphabetically by the 3-letter code.

http://tatoeba.org/eng/stats/sentences_by_language

I'm not sure this is a good idea, but it's an idea to consider.
Perhaps this would put the languages people are most interested in near the top of the translations.

I think it should be possible, I’d be in favour of such a thing, but I’m not sure about the problems this could introduce.

First, let me explain why we’re having restricted characters in usernames.

Usernames are used inside URLs and should be unique. It is meant to create readable URLs (for both humans and machines). They act as unique identifiers and are part of the URL when you access a page that include the user name, such as tatoeba.org/jpn/user/profile/Pfirsichbaeumchen or tatoeba.org/jpn/activities/translate_sentences_of/Pfirsichbaeumchen.

URL can actually *only* contain these restricted symbols (letters, numbers and a few symbols). If you want to include any other character, you need to convert them into percent-escape sequences that look ugly. For instance, the actual URL of the Käse German Wikipedia article is de.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4se, which only contains the restricted characters thanks to the percent escape. This extends to characters in any alphabet other than English, like Chinese, Arabic… anything supported by Unicode.

But nowadays, most browsers just display Käse instead of K%C3%A4se inside the address bar for your convenience. They can do this since 2005 because the way to do the percent-escape became standard¹, whereas it wasn’t before. So it’s mostly historical reasons.

Here are some problems I can think of because of the introduction of other characters in usernames:
• even if names would be displayed in a readable way within most browsers address bar, they wouldn’t be anymore in other contexts that include raw URLs, such as text emails, sentences comments and Wall posts (we may fix that), server logs…;
• current users should have to keep their original restricted username while new users would be able to create better usernames, unless we create a renaming feature
• the site would be vulnerable to user spoofing: a user that pretends to be someone else by creating an account that uses a name very close to an existing user, using very close characters².

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...rrent_standard
² https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3987#section-8