The vast majority of site authentications (including many very large sites) use http, so their authentication code should be hashing and salting the password on the client-side and sending the result to the server for authentication. In this model, the site never actually has a plaintext copy of the password.

In this model, the server would receive the (unsalted) hash of the password when the password is set, and a salted hash for each login. At no point will the server ever have the plaintext password.

I describe the implementation details here:

http://loewald.com/blog/?p=1374

This is not a secure system. It is completely broken. The hash simply becomes the password when you do this. All an attacker needs to do is replay the hash and they're in. The "plaintext" is irrelevant, because an attacker doesn't need it.

Also, if you're storing the unsalted hash in your DB, your security is doubly broken. Someone who accesses your DB can more easily brute force the passwords (it looks like you're using a single salt rather than a per-user salt), and your scheme is vulnerable to rainbow attacks as well.