questions on Rules used to reject plains

Hey crackerz,
I was checking out the rules and I have a question.
Some of the rules reject candidates...
here is my question:

are the rules to reject plains acting on the source or the results of the rule?

lets say we have a rule like this : <10 $1$2$3
and a word : password

would this be rejected because :
source: password (8 characters)
result: password123 (11 characters)


also is there a difference between those rules :
<10 $1$2$3
$1$2$3 <10

the thing is I want to reject candidate that are less than 8 char AFTER all the transformation.

btw im sorry my native language is not english.