On skim-reading the article it seems they were banned from submitting entries to a competition server for 12 months because they made a significant number of submissions.

It's arguable that they were gaming the system somewhat, but unless a limit was explicitly defined then this just seems like they were doing a lot of exploration in the area.

Imagine if you published some research showing you'd made something that did something cool, but then people lost respect for you because you'd made a lot of previous attempts.