Watch out for 500 errors due to gclid

One kind of 500 seeing I've been seeing is this:

GET /
(traceback)
TypeError: index() got an unexpected keyword argument 'gclid'

I shrugged these off (stupid bots) but no these are VERY BAD.

After a little Googling, I discovered that Google AdWords adds this parameter to requests to track when people click through your ads. (We do a small amount of ads on Google.) Well every one of these that we've been paying for (!) have been getting 500 errors instead of the main page because of this added parameter! I have tg.strict_parameters set.

If you run a site and are using AdWords, make sure you aren't getting these errors. I would never have known if I hadn't turned on error reporting (see here).