When you click on "Create Reports", OOTP will create the same reports which are being used inside the game. The league reports, team reports, player pages, the history reports, and so on. There are NO special online league files which are created by the reports dialog. The whole /news folder structure does not contain any special online league files.
When you click on "Create Reports", a new file named "files.txt" will be created inside the import_export folder. It will list all reports and images and so on that have been handled. If you tick the "Include Images" checkbox, these images will not be created, they will not be copied, but they will be listed in the files.txt! If you've set a date range, for example 7, only the box scores, game logs and news files of the last 7 game days will be in the files.txt.
In other words: You set the options as you want them, click on "Create files", and after the creation process the files.txt will contain a list of all files that match the options.
Now you click on "copy files" and only these files will be copied to the folder that you've defined.
OR you click on "FTP upload" and all these files will be uploaded.
OR you use the files.txt to create a ZIP file or whatever which you can upload.
The files.txt format is easy (but well, it's not intuitive).
Each line starts with a letter that represents a folder (relative to the /news/html folder):
a /
b /leagues
c /teams
d /players
e /box_scores
f /game_logs
g /coaches
h /history
i /images
So if your league database was in c:\program files\si games\ootp\saved_games\your league.lg, the letter "g" would represent c:\program files\si games\ootp\saved_games\your league.lg\news\html\coaches
The character following the letter is a tab (chr(9) I believe, or \t in C) and starting with the third character in the line there is the name of the file.
EDIT: you don't need the files.txt at all if you don't want to use a special tool or something like that. If you want to get all the files that match the options that you've set in the create reports dialog (date range), simply enter the folder name of an empty folder like c:\temp and click on "copy files". All the files listed in the files.txt will then be copied to that folder, including the folder structure, so you can then just zip that c:\temp folder and upload it.
Another EDIT: Only the following files in the /news/html folder structure should
not be deleted:
- the file /styles.css
- the files inside the images folder
- the files inside the box_scores folder
All the other files in the /news/html folder structure are being created "on demand" whenever you click on a link inside the game, or when you use the "Create Reports" dialog. The news and game log files for example are being created by the game based on the corresponding files inside the /news/txt folder structure. Again: all the files in the /news/html folder structure, which are not in the root, or in the images or box_scores folders, can be deleted anytime.
Hope that makes sense
Andreas