FarmVille: Show fewer pop-ups option removes ability to share trees

Last week, Zynga launched the option to allow folks to see less pop-ups in FarmVille. These "show fewer" windows appear after you've repeatedly canceled or "x-ed" out pop-ups to share item to your friends / news feed. While that seems like a perfect system, there's one particular area that has users very concerned due to its execution. The area? Growing Mystery Seedlings into adult trees.

For users such as myself (and the many others who have reported this issue on the FarmVille forums), we received the "show fewer" pop-up while canceling the option to ask for Watering Cans on our feeds. When I'm in a marathon tree-growing session, the last thing I want to do is spam my friends with 30+ news feed posts, all asking for watering cans, especially when I currently have enough of them in my inventory or I wouldn't have started the process in the first place. So, being given the option to skip these pop-ups seems perfect, right? Unfortunately not, as canceling the Watering Can windows also seems to have permanently removed the ability to share any fully grown trees with your friends. Uh oh.
farmville pop ups share trees
For tree collectors, one of the easiest ways (and most fun ways) of expanding your collection is to claim those adult trees grown by your friends. After all, if you chose not to purchase a particular tree from the store for Farm Cash, you can find one, absolutely free, from a friend. But now, these pop-ups have vanished for those users that simply didn't want to spam watering can requests.

As of this writing, Zynga has yet to make an official statement on the matter, but it does raise an interesting question. Have we brought this on ourselves? Or has Zynga's lack of an explanation only made things more confusing and compacted the error? On one hand, we did request to see less pop-ups, but when we allow the show fewer pop-ups stipulation to take hold when dealing with watering cans only, there's nothing logically stating that it should extend to every aspect of the tree growing process. Perhaps Zynga should better layout the ground rules for these "show fewer" windows when they appear, letting us know exactly which windows will vanish, and which we'll still see.

Until then (or until they release a way for us to "undo" our choices), I suppose the best thing would be to avoid these pop-ups when doing anything related to your trees, lest you end up in the same boat as we are - with a group of disappointed friends who can no longer claim your free trees. Yikes!

Have you experienced this issue on your farm, where you wanted to turn off one kind of pop-up, but actually saw the removal of all tree pop-ups?