If you defined some scraping and crawling rules for a given web source, but later you want to reuse them for another web source, then you can define the latter as a web source cloned from the former.
<clonedWebSource
name="aClonedSource">
<cloner>theClonerSource</cloner>
</clonedWebSource>
<webSource name="theClonerSource">
...
</webSource>
In the above example, aClonedSource inherits the nextStepsList and the slots of theClonerSource.
Actually, the cloned source will inherit all the cloner's attributes; anyway, you can define a custom authentication method, and you can overwrite the fullDiff and historyKeepAll attributes.
The providers of the cloned source are executed together with the providers of the cloner; if you do not want to execute the cloner's providers, you must set the useClonerProviders attribute to false.
<clonedWebSource name="..."
useClonerProviders="false">
<cloner>theClonerSource</cloner>
</clonedWebSource>