Originally Posted by
twospoons
My recent experiment may not have revealed an actual reliable count, but I proved this (to my own satisfaction at least):
Most neighbors, even great ones, cannot respond to every request they get. The list of requests to either accept/decline in a person's news feed isn't infinite, and when goals get released, a high proportion of the players will be sending out requests--first for the random first step, then for first oven parts. So unless your neighbor is in the game pretty much right after you sent your request, that request is going to move further down the queue as all of her other neighbors make their requests. And then your request is going to get bumped out--possibly to pop back up a couple days later, possibly never to be seen again.
Like I said, a reliable number of how many requests will display hasn't been ascertained, but if your neighbors have lots of neighbors themselves, it's really not hard to imagine that your request was just not recent enough by the time they logged on. They're not inactive, nor are they being rude, they just never had the chance to respond.
But I too wish requests were above gifts!