Wrong type of community for me personally. It's mostly designers and not enough interesting stuff from an engineering perspective. One too many HTML5 CSS3 show off links. I'm more interested in systems programming topics.

I would say Forrst tends to be tilted towards web development but of the 30 most recent code snippet posts only two were design related.

I applied, out of curiosity, but I have to say I'm a bit apprehensive about an invite-only community. The insistence on having a Gravatar almost feels cultish.

Forrst is does not require a Gravatar and how does the use of Gravatar in an way resemble a cult?

Invite-only, and one must fill out an application? I'd pass, based on that alone. Under such circumstances, I would have never been able to enjoy HN, for example.

If there is a strong desire for an "exclusive" community, how about requiring people to pay to use it?

Growing communities is incredibly difficult and Forrst choose to do so through invites and an application process.

Charging to get access to a community is not really a viable option until you have the community built to charge access to.