That's actually a pretty ugly error by Pylons' standards. Normally a _very_ useful debugging console gets presented to the devs, and the public gets a standard

That's actually a pretty ugly error by Pylons' standards. Normally a _very_ useful debugging console gets presented to the devs, and the public gets a standard (but customizable/replaceable) error screen. What happened here is that the exception happened again while trying to process the error (syntax errors in your base-level code will do that), and the Pylons exception handling gave up and rendered this error. I don't know offhand exactly what produced that error message, as I've never seen it in my Pylons apps, but I'd suggest it's probably from paste.exceptions somewhere. http://pythonpaste.org/module-paste.exceptions.html http://pythonpaste.org/module-paste.exceptions.html EDIT: I realized that the reason I never see this is because Reddit uses flup's SCGI server, while I use a mod_proxy-based approach. So that exception-formatting code is probably in flup somewhere. http://trac.saddi.com/flup http://trac.saddi.com/flup