Why am I needing to add ampersand manually in rewrites?

[jamz]

In a Wordpress/Buddypress installation, I am having to go through all my
code and manually insert ampersands. For example, where there are links
to things such as "?r=user" I am having to convert that into "?&r=user"
in order for the link to do the required function. Or when it says
"?_wpnonce" I am needing to change it to "?&_wpnonce". 

Am I missing something? Is there an easy rewrite rule I can use for
Nginx to fix this?

I am on Nginx only, not using it as a proxy to Apache.

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,188044,188044#msg-188044