At first it's your core responsibilities to secure your participants payment as a bounty manager.
All bounty manager's should put their participants first and not what they received as payment to manage the campaign, whenever I noticed delay in bounty campaign then I term it upon the campaign manager because they were only interested of what the project will pay out to them at that very moments otherwise, what they could have think is to set a standard of securing participants payment before even launching the campaign. I think there are some bounty manager's who is accepting escrow before launching their campaign, this shows that their participants is their most priority than just rushing to accept a campaign and launched before even thinking of paying bounty hunters.
At this point whom do you blame, yourself or the project owners? To me you have yourself to be blame, excepts you made it clear on the campaign thread that bounty is going to be distributed by projects owners that anyone joining is at their own risk. If the project doesn't pay then no one is permitted to hold you responsible.
During the period of our work - we try as much as possible to bring a bounty campaign that will be ESCROW
We prioritize bounty hunter! And at one time in the bounty announcements thread we started to specify ESCROW, which made a BOOM with campaigns, which we are very happy and support our colleagues in it
But there are sometimes good projects that do not want to escrow the reward, in this case the project allocated 10 k $ in tokens at the time of distribution - after analyzing the project we agreed to run the campaign with the hope that the payment will happen - the project worked and continues to work, the team was active with us in chat - but at the end of the campaign we began to ignore and eventually we were banned, participants who raised the issue of payment in chat were also banned.
Yes you are right, if the campaign is not escrow - everyone goes at his own risk.
But the main thing for us is the opinion of hunters - they asked to publish a post about it here on the forum - we did - whether it will help us to get paid - we will see.
That is how project owners behave most times I could a remember a bounty I joined then, they took very long time to distribute token in a way that hunters was accusing the manager for keeping payment within himself. After much, the project owners later paid the hunters and that was very good, but in the case of your project owner it quite hard to understand whether they still have the hunters at their mind to pay them or not.
But making a post shows that you have removed the allegations from your and it's now laying between project owner and hunters, even though you have created a topic here this doesn't mean that you have the project pays for the waste of time and energy hunters has put to promote their project. Does anyone really have the power to tarnished the image of that project? No, rather they will deny of everything about they have discussed with possible where waiting for the right to pay hunters but blocking you and anyone who asked about payment shows a clear evidence that they want to distribute rewards to hunters therefore whatever please the hunter they should do to them. If they are listed on CMC every hunter should go give them negative review or rating.