FarmVille: Special delivery boxes disappearing? Empty out your Gift Box

Are you a FarmVille item collector? I know I am. I constantly have a Gift Box that's as close to the 500 item limit as possible, filled with everything from extra Bottles and Love Potions to (now) all six different building materials. I have over 100 Mystery Seedlings, enough Watering Cans to survive a virtual apocalypse, and various quest items for every future quest I know I'll come upon in the English Countryside. Add this to the random ducklings, animals, trees and decorations and you have...well, you have a lot of items!

Now, while the item limit in the Gift Box is technically 500, there are ways of going over that limit. Did you know, however, that doing so can actually end up hurting you in the long run? If your Gift Box is over 500 items, and you happen to own a stockpile of Special Delivery Boxes, you might have noticed that miraculously, without warning, those Boxes start to disappear - perhaps 10 here, 25 there, or even random numbers. Did you notice that those Special Delivery Boxes only go away when logging into the game, and not while actually playing? It turns out that for users that have over 500 items, this is the first item to go, as Zynga has developed a system to track "hoarders" and figuratively punish them automatically, without warning, removing excess items from Gift Boxes that have exceeded the 500 item limit.