I'm putting up this one because I've learned some folks haven't been told about this one, so thought I'd put it here. In EE the chat box and combat box is all combined, unlike in 1.69. To seperate them, right click on the bar at the top of the dialogue box and select the top option of 'split chat box'. Otherwise, you can keep it the same and remove some parts of the chat - removing shouts will remove DM message shouts so that's a bad idea, but removing server messages will stop the 'joined as a player' and 'left as a player.'
Hope that helps!