Hey Bob,
I have checked it once more, but they do have the exlamation point.
Made some changes to the following:
added the tagKey parameter with the value of 'articletags'.
[[!tolinks? &items=`[[+tv.articlestags]]` &target=`[[*id]]` &tagKey=`articlestags` &useTagsFurl=`0` &outputDelim=``]]
Now I have the blog up & running without friendly URLS

result:
/index.php?id=7&tag=ux&key=articlestags
Still, don't have it working with friendly URLS. That would be sweet!
Could it be a bad NGINX config file?
Here's a section of my nginx config file for the domain in question.
Am I missing something?
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm/mydomain.socket;
}
location / {
index index.php index.html index.htm;
# try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite;
}
location @rewrite {
rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1;
}
#Leverage browser caching
location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|svg|css|js)$ {
expires 365d;
}