I'm playing a scientist right now, I always find the tourist near a public BBQ if you go close of the road in the world of the science lab you will normally found a BBQ and some picnic table. Even if the sims is a "npc" or already in the world (ex. Bob Pancake, he is always there in my game grilling stuff) If I interact with them for a task exemple freezing a tourist, if I frooze Bob it validate the task, cause he is not a employe of the Lab even if he is not a Alien. So I don't know if is a bug, but in my gameplay it's how I manage to do it 🙂
For the computer you can replace them by just cliking on them in life mode you won't get charge the fee for the replacement cause you are not at your home, it happen also with the chimie and other stuff that are use by the employe or by your sims to do the "job'
The only thing you can't do the option replace it's the machine to create the invention, if you'r affraid to make your sims repair it, you can just replace it via de buy/build menu and using the code bb.showhiddenobjects it won't cost your sim the charge of the objects cause it's on a community lot. You may need to use the cheat testingcheats true before using the showhiddenobjects code, but I'm not sure you may need to test it 🙂
Hope it did help you a little bit <3
Hm, in that case, I definitely think that a patch or pack might have broken tourists. A long time ago, you could immediately find tourists on these days. They would be fooling around right there in the facility! And yes, like @JochenWeiss said, I do think there used to be a bubble over their heads which specified them as tourists. I have no idea of knowing which patch or pack could have broken them, though.
I'm guessing the missing tag issue is a separate issue and if someone could make a new thread for that, that would be great.
I have actually not seen any tags on CL tourists either but yeah, not sure if they had a tag or not.
Not seeing them on CL tourist was the main reason I suggested a thread.
